Nanoparticles Contributing to Illnesses?

hello everyone,

i can see no reason to go to new technologies for common household items. the old ways of doing things were at least not harmful to health. you will never convince the people in industry that want to use nanos because it can make products cheaper. well, cheaper is not always better. asbestos was cheap also. what price health. what price for an invalid and terminal population, just for higher profits. doesn't make sense to me.

when i first heard of nano technologies i thought they were really interesting and useful. then the potential health problems started being written about. some industries do things the cheap way, just to be competitive. the nickel on the faceplate's of some cell phones is an example. nickel is cheap, some other shiny metal would be more expensive. but when you hold that piece of nickel against the same piece of skin all of the time, strange things start to happen to the skin. i am sure we have all heard of many things that industry has foisted on the consumers that were really not that good for people. in the old days, they used to put mercury in laxatives.

yes, i belive we should err on the side of caution. not buyer beware.

So burnt toast,overcooked lamb,fried hair,all contribute nano particles to the air i breath...I suppose spray on deoderants,steam rising from my tea kettle,fumes from my aftershave,overspray from using my electric toohbrush all contribute to my limited lifetime..

Perhaps it is time to loosen up on nano realizing its always been part of our collective universe but has now begun to be looked at in a more critical way as a means to an end..Generally in our civilization the end is money ...However to get to that end much scientific effort generates surprisingly novel ways of looking at opportunities be they in energy/refining methods of disease detection etc..At the end of the day nanotechnology has always been around...Like the makers of carbon black the techniques to form useful nanoscale devices is happening in increased mass/volume levels with hopeful outcomes....Promulgating fear over something that has always been here can stop development of the technology quicker than a speeding bullet...

Loosen up y'all.........Regards,Marty W.

martywolf,

i have heard this complaint before. you have a right to your opinion. your actions though do affect all those around you. i once had a similar discussion sitting in a restaurant talking to another customer who was a cotton farmer. i told him i shy away from eating any food that has cottonseed oil in it, because of the use of pesticides and herbicides on the cotton. at that point thru gritted teeth, he told my i was full of shit because they don't use anything within 5 days of harvest and he had been assured that none of the residue was still on the seeds and oil. he got so mad telling me this that he got up and left his breakfast and stormed out. i guess i am lucky he didn't go postal on me.

my point is that the government in the interest of the almighty dollar allows a certain amount of bad things in the food we eat, in the air we breath, in the clothes we wear, in everything. one of the reasons it is allowed is because most people do not show immediate and long term reactions to the adulteration. BUT, and here is the big BUT, some people do. these are mostly people that have been sensitised to that adulteration. people that have not, speak like you do. people in power speak like you do. they are even allowing a certain amount of adulteration in ORGANIC FOOD AND OTHER ORGANIC PRODUCTS.

so, if you are sensitive to these adulterations or do not want to become sensitised, it is up to you to hide from society, to grow your own food, to buy products that are truly organic, all at a much higher price than common goods. this is the hidden tax on people who just want to and try to be free of adulteration.

so, allowing nano particles created by high tech just for the purpose of making things cheaper and more profitable for them passes along a hidden cost for the rest of society. "hidden costs"? think of the hidden costs of alcoholism. lost wages, lost families, early deaths, lost lifestyles. these are all hidden costs that slowly come due and society has to pay for them eventually.

so, your point that "we need to loosen up", or get over it means that you have accepted all of these hidden costs for yourself and your family and those you interact with. for those that do not want to pay those hidden costs, we say no, we should tighten up, we should get focused, we should tell everyone what the hidden costs are, we should make it law that they have to tell us ALL of the hidden costs. if this means that their costs go up, so what. that just means that they are absorbing some of the hidden costs that they were profiting from. if in the interest of society some products that they use are banned, so what. the good of society is of more importance than their profits.

the adage of FOLLOW THE MONEY still applies, if you want to truly find out why something is done the way it is.

joe

Artbyjoe couldn't be more wrong if he tried. You expect to see this sort of white is black and black is white type argument in the liberal media, but not in an engineering forum. As an engineer, I sincerely hope Joe is an artiste, not an engineer!

A very unhidden and burdensome tax would be levied on the vast majority of people if all food were organic. The reason the world now supports six billion plus souls is the incredible productivity of modern agriculture, which can be described by the slogan, "better living through chemistry." You take that away, and untold numbers would starve to death, and the standard of living of the rest would decrease markedly as a significantly larger share of their income went to putting food on the table. It would be like going back to the middle ages. Check out life expectancy back when all food was organic...

Now note that Artbyjoe can go out and buy the pure foods he wants, assuming he can pay for it. It's not as if organic food is unavailable or proscribed. Looks like Artbyjoe is just one more liberal who can't stand the free market - he thinks the world ought to run per his own personal whims.

Hey Artbyjoe, your guys won the election. It's only a matter of time until they are telling all of us exactly what to do and when to do it. Relax, enjoy, life is good.

emc c

your reply is so far over the top, that i am not going to debate it. i would not know where to start or end. every sentence you wrote has something wrong with it. so, i will just state that i stand by my words. i won't say what i think of your attempts to marginalize and trivialize the truth.

i see nothing wrong with using an engineering forum to discuss the ill effects on human beings of technology designed by engineers. or do engineers get to live by a different standard of ethics just because they are "the engineers".

i will try to give one more example: a food additive. is it good or bad? the engineer who came up with it or says, well it doesn't hurt to many people, and it makes lots of money, so it must be good. the humanist says: i don't care how much money it can make, if it can hurt people.

how can it be that people can see things at such polar opposites. do you think that the engineers who put lead in paint didn't know that lead is harmful? do you think the population said, "oh gives us more lead. it leads to such a better life". again, follow the money.

Not a single logical argument, just vituperation. I feel MUCH better - artbyjoe is a "humanist," not a lowlife engineer.

Artbyjoe is correct about one thing, we are so far apart there is no point in a discussion. We might as well be speaking in different tongues. But for the record, my original response to artbyjoe was not for him, but for the blog readers who may be susceptible to logic.

Just an idle speculation. Artbyjoe contrasts the saintly "humanist" with the diabolical, profit-driven engineer. One has to wonder how much of ArtbyJoe's life has been affected by humanists vs. engineers. Does Artbyjoe drive a car, use a PC, talk on a phone or cell phone, listen to radio, watch TV, etc.?

I suppose Artbyjoe will name some names of prominent humanists. I will beat him to the punch. Numero Uno would be Jozef Stalin, who labored mightily to make the Soviet Union fulfill the promise of being the worker's paradise. Okay, it didn't quite work out as old Joe kept promising during each of those Five Year Plans, and yes a few million recalcitrants had to be terminated early, but hey, he had good intentions, right Artbyjoe?

And a close second might be Rachel Carson, who ought to be one Artbyjoe's heroines. She singlehandedly eliminated DDT from use in controlling mosquito populations, on the basis that it was bad for bird egg shells (a contention that has since been discredited). It is estimated that since the 1960s when the ban went into effect that tens of millions of people died from mosquito-born illnesses in the Third World; people who would not have needed to die if DDT had not been banned.

Well it was doubtless chemical engineers who developed DDT, and it was a "humanist" who got it banned. I leave it to the readership to decide who is better and who is worse for humanity - engineers or "humanists."

emc c

i think it is disingenuous to compare Stalinism and who ever else you were talking about with concern about the negative health effects technology.

how do most safety regulations come into effect? it isn't from altruism of the corporate world. it is from regulation of products and services by the government to protect the people.

it is almost as if you are blaming the people who are the victims for being un American. you have a very strange ethos. it is almost as if you are saying that the corporations are the victims and need to be protected from the lazy, shiftless, protesting long hairs. in my opinion corportations are under regulated not over regulated. why is that legally a corporation has more rights than citizens or towns in America?

why is it you can not discuss subjects without getting mean and calling names? what have i done to deserve that? is it just because i have different opinions than you do about what is right, fair and correct? is it because i have different ideas than you on corporate responsibility. that they should be held to higher standard? that the products they provide and profit from should be healthy and safe?

if you can not discuss these issues without becoming nasty, then you should stop replying. this is an engineering forum, not a nastyness forum. haven't you noticed that when discussions get like this that the serious engineers at this forum stop contributing and unsubscribe from the thread?

Regulation is regulation, Artbyjoe. A skunk by another name still stinks. I am surprised that the name Rachel Carson, the author of "Silent Spring" in 1962 is unfamiliar.

You come into an engineering forum, telling us we are profit-mongering scum that must be controlled by high-minded "humanists" such as yourself, and you call me nasty for calling you on it? We hear and have to put up with these baseless truisms in the press and in our daily lives, and then you invade an engineers' forum with it and expect to be welcomed with open arms?

Tell me, Artbyjoe, what fundamental difference is there between the high-minded "humanists" who are government regulators and the scum who go into business and develop products which people buy of their own free will? Is it just some natural difference between good (government) and bad (private sector) people?

And how is that the government regulators are so much smarter than the rest of us that they have the right and duty to order our lives? Why is it that Senate majority leader Harry Reid can direct the CEOs of the Big Three automakers to take their business plans to Senator Dodd (D-Conn) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) and have them pronounce on the quality of said plans? How can it be that the two characters most closely associated with the disaster in the mortgage industry are yet smart enough to give thumbs up or down on the plans of the auto industry?

emc c

i think i will send you private emails from now on. i am unsubscribing from this thread now, as no one but us seems to want to be part of it.

Joe,

In many cases, nobody knew the bad effects. I've mixed white lead in linseed oil with my bare hands. I've cut asbestoes on a table saw. I used to keep a chunk of uranium in my desk drawer right above my scrotum. I've cleaned a thousand things with benzene. It wasn't profit or greed - I just didn't know; nobody did.

But, even when we know, we have to weigh benefits vs costs. And that's not just about profits. For example in the railroad highway crossing business, there are conflicting requirements between saving lives by warning people and making people disregard the warnings by too many false alarms. So, there is some sort of best minimum, maybe as many as several hundred deaths a year. To get the number below that, you'd have to have armed guards and concrete barriers at the crossings.

So, enginers have to be able to sometimes do things that will cause harm simply because it's the best solution for the moment.

Nanotechnologies in stoves? Not any that I've seen and we just bought a new one. Hair dryers? Power tools? What nanoparticles are being used? For what purpose.

I think you might be talking about fine particles thrown off from motor brushes?
Any sort of dust isn't all that good for breathing, but this study sounds a little funky. I'd have to read it and I'm not going to take the time.

No study..Just common sense....Nano is small 10 to the minus nine meteres small..Look at the size of some life systems themselves..Look at the size of a molecule of water or a tiny bit of soot..look at the size of the exhaust molecules coming out of your car..Look at the size of the molecules you are sharing with every intake of breathe and outflow of breath with the rest of humanity...Look and see that nothing can be made that is not makeable..Its all around allready...Technocrats have keyed in to how to utilize the very small to do the very large....There will be shysters that hurt others with their lust for money but logic dictates that in 2008 with a burgeoning population we must ,to quote EE Schumacher obliquely," learn to do more with less"...I say this only partly in jest and partly in irony that the grand master of econmics title could easily apply to nanotechnology...less eneregy..more complete stewardship of resources...less overall pollution(underutilized resource"..possibilities for cures of diseases vs drug company forte of stabilizing symptoms etc.etc..

Regards...Marty Wolf perhaps an overly active contributor with little expertise in anything but a broad reader of writings...

At the end of the day this life is a journey either of discovery or sensual selfishness.MW

I know from my work that anything under about 3 microns can't be eliminated from the lungs once inhaled. Using any particle that size, be it coal or toner, is a big problem. So a nanoparticle dust would be an issue.

But I don't think that appliance companies are using a lot of nanoparticles in their products deliberately. I have heard of a silver nanopraticle being used in something to sanitize the end product. Not sure that a blow dryer or power tool has that or any other nanoparticle.

I think somebody is trying to make a fuss to get more funding.