Tech Talk

The latest scare screed from an NGO on the subject of nanotechnology comes from the Australian-based Friends of the Earth in their latest report “Out of the laboratory and on to our plates: Nanotechnology in food and agriculture”. The report comes replete with images of faceless scientists injecting some unknown chemical into some fruit.

As propaganda goes this is top-notch stuff. As far as keeping to facts, and avoiding misleading hype, it falls short. TNTLog does a thorough job of putting the report in its appropriate place.

But the environmental and health concerns surrounding nanotechnology need to be addressed, and none more acutely than the occupational safety and health issues for those workers involved in manufacturing processes that employ nanoparticles.

Nanowerk has written a spotlight piece on this issue that introduces a recent report and survey conducted by Kaspar Schmid and Michael Riediker from the Institute of Health Economics and Management at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland entitled “Use of Nanoparticles in Swiss Industry: A Targeted Survey”.

While the Friends of the Earth select out portions of the 2004 Royal Society Report to arrive at a conclusion that a moratorium is needed on nanotechnology (something that the Royal Society Report never does itself), the Royal Society Report does express keen concern about “free” nanoparticles and the risk that they may hold for workers.

The recent Swiss report is not trying to create headline-grabbing fear mongering, but is in the silent pursuit of facts. And one of the key findings is fairly disturbing: that there are few, if any, best-practice regulations from either industry or government on how to handle nanoparticles.

If concerns about the environmental and health impact of nanoparticles are to be fruitfully pursued, then addressing occupational health and safety of so-called nanoworkers is a good place to start and one where the risk is probably the highest.

By engaging in scare tactics that require the dubious linking of nanotechnology to genetic engineering and synthetic biology, important nanotoxicological research into nanoparticles and the best-practice regulations that would follow are prevented from getting their proper place in the list of priorities.