As nanotech develops, so do safety questions
Posted on Monday, April 17, 2006
RENO, Nev. — To tour the gleaming offices of Altair Nanotechnologies Inc. is to see why the U. S. Commerce Department calls nanotech “the next industrial revolution” — a revolution not of smelters and smokestacks but of precision-engineered carbon “buckyballs” one-ten-thousandth the size of the head of a pin and microscopic nanospheres that can pack the power of a car battery in a napkin-thin wafer. What could be more 21 st-century ?
But pass through heavy doors into the heart of Altair’s manufacturing area and the future looks a lot like the past.
Men in grease-stained blue coats navigate catwalks atop hulking, two-story-tall spraydrying machines. Forklift drivers steer 55-gallon drums of chemicals from one area to another. Other workers attend to noisy milling operations, their face masks gathering a thin film of pale dust as they empty buckets of freshly made powders to be used in nanotech batteries and premium paints.
As the U. S. economy strides into the age of nanotechnology, thousands of workers like these are participants in a seat-of-thepants occupational health experiment.
No state or federal workerprotection rules address the specific risks of nanomaterials, even though many laboratory and animal studies have shown that nano-size particles — those on the order of a millionth of a millimeter — spur peculiar biological reactions and can be far more toxic than larger granules of the same chemicals.
The Food and Drug Administration said last week that it plans to have an October meeting to discuss the new kinds of nanotechnology materials being developed for use in the products it regulates, including drugs, foods, cosmetics and medical devices.
The FDA announcement comes as officials with Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment continue to probe 97 cases of intoxication, some of them severe, in people who had used a recently introduced aerosol cleaning product called “Magic Nano.”
The product, which is not sold in the United States, has since been withdrawn from sale in Germany. Officials there said they assume inhalation of the aerosol droplets caused the respiratory problems, but that they cannot rule out whether the nanoparticles it contains also contributed.
“These incidents have demonstrated that the introduction of new technologies in consumer products must be coupled with an assessment of the possible risks arising from their use. It is incumbent on science to communicate this message to consumers as well,” Institute President Andreas Hensel said in a statement.
U. S. regulators say they need more data before setting standards. But of the $ 1. 2 billion the government has proposed spending on its National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2007 — a research funding program to help jump-start the promising sector — only about one-fifth of 1 percent is earmarked to study workplace safety issues.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration does have a general “nuisance standard” for airborne particles, “but that standard is not going to be very useful for nanomaterials,” said John Balbus, a physician and health program director for Environmental Defense, a watchdog group. Just three weeks in a workplace with that level of engineered nanospecks would be equivalent to the exposure that caused animals to choke to death in experiments in 2004, Balbus said.
Then again, government scientists admit, the science is so young that they do not even know what they should be focusing on: Is it the number of particles a person is exposed to that matters most ? Is it their chemical composition or size ? Or, as recent research suggests, is it the total surface area of each intricately etched nanoparticle — a complex spatial dimension that instruments can barely measure ?
“We have very little data to make any kind of informed societal decisions about how to deal with nanomaterials in the workplace,” said Paul Schulte, the director of education and information at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
That is why a swarm of scientists from the institute recently spent the better part of a week at Altair with nearly a ton of equipment for measuring worker exposures to nanoparticles.
Altair was not in trouble far from it. The inspection was at the invitation of the company’s chief executive, Alan Gotcher. Unlike many of his corporate peers, who have kept their heads down amid a flurry of questions about what, exactly, they are making and how they are assuring worker safety, Gotcher thinks the industry should share what it knows about nanotech manufacturing methods and safety strategies.
“We need to be responsible and we have to be proactive, and if we’ve got products that have problems, we’ve got to do something about it,” Gotcher said. “On the flip side, we should not let fear of the unknown cause an overreaction.”
Occupational settings have often served as bellwethers of toxic trouble. A spate of skin cancers in radiologists 100 years ago revealed the link between X-rays and cancer. “Mad hatters,” who worked with mercury-exposed felt, demonstrated that metal’s neurotoxic effects. And the link between asbestos and lung disease first came to light in workers handling the fibrous mineral.
Time will tell how much of a health risk various nanomaterials pose.
But experts agree that workers producing them face the greatest danger because they are exposed to the free-floating motes directly, before they have been integrated into finished products. And although only a fraction of the estimated 210, 000 workers involved in nanomanufacturing are being exposed directly to free particles, the industry is growing fast, according to Lux Research in New York. By 2014, Lux predicts, the value of goods made with new nanotechnologies will be $ 2. 6 trillion — 200 times as much as in 2004.
“We don’t want to be sitting around 20 years from now saying, ‘Gee, I wish we had looked into this, ”’ said Charles Geraci, a branch chief for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health who was part of the team visiting Altair.
For starters, that means figuring out how to measure worker exposures. A central goal of the institute’s visit was to compare readouts from the agency’s cumbersome and expensive instruments with those from cheaper, hand-held devices, to see if the latter can suffice.
“ We want to know if you can do this without a $ 75, 000 piece of equipment and six Ph. D. s,” said Mark Hoover, a scientist with the institute. Information for this article was provided by Andrew Bridges of The Associated Press.
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