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Since the law on health and safety was voted on the 1 st July 1998, the role of the Institut de Veille Sanitaire (InVS) 1 has been to detect “any event which changes or might change the population’s state of health” and to alert public authorities with the help of various health organisations, such as the Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments (AFSSA) 2. This requirement for a monitoring and alarm system came into being after the many public crises that marked the 1990s, and has become new common administrative and legal ground, some of the consequences of which we we will be examining here, by taking up the question of alarm raisers. We have been able to show how the configuration that we have labelled “vigilance policy” came into being, following on from a series of affairs and alerts in fields as far ranging as technology, the environment, human health, agriculture and food (Chateauraynaud & Torny, 1999b). Over recent years, what has above all been forced upon the actors involved is a deconfining of fields which had previously remained relatively closed and isolated: health and safety warnings now concern technological sectors (such as nuclear energy), environmental controversies increasingly relate to human health (legionnaire’s disease, dioxin), agricultural debates examine questions of