Ministry Of Employment and Labor (MOEL) and Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (KOSHA) had a building completion ceremony of the Chronic Inhalation Toxicity Research Center at Daedeok Science Complex in Daejeon on 14th December, 2015 and started research activities.

The Center is first in Korea and 5th in the world following the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan.

Chronic inhalation toxicity test projects any harmfulness upon long-term exposure to low concentration of toxic chemicals through respiratory for workers.

There was no chronic toxicity test due to absence of research facility so far even though 450,000 kinds of chemicals are used within Korea, and annually about 400 new chemicals are manufactured or imported.

Despite cause of the acute inhalation; workers are exposed to high concentration of chemicals was relatively easy to found, the correlation between chronic inhalation; long-term exposure to low concentration of toxic chemicals and occupational diseases had no clear scientific basis.

The newly established center is expected to provide science-based data and enable clarification of harmfulness projection to workers who experienced chronic inhalation and cause of hazards to workers' health.

The research data from the center will be used to clarify toxicity of hazardous chemicals at workplace and as fundamental data for legal management.

On top of that it will find risk of various unidentified toxic substances such as nanomaterials so that actively react against them. In the future, the data will contribute to find out the cause of occupational diseases like; occupational cancer among electricity and automobile related industries' workers.

The center's construction project started from the April 2014 and its budget was approximately 39.1 billion won.

- The center is three-story building with size of 7,294㎡. There are 60 inhalation chambers and about 40 researchers.

The president of KOSHA Young Soon, LEE said, "Along with the industrial development in Rep. of Korea, use of chemicals are continuously increasing. The Korean first Chronic Inhalation Toxicity Research Center will tremendously improve safety in the use of chemicals, working environment and workers' health."