Health Risks From Nanotechnology

February 1st, 2011

AOL News

By: Andrew Schneider

For almost two years, molecular biologist Bénédicte Trouiller doused the drinking water of scores of lab mice with nano-titanium dioxide, the most common nanomaterial used in consumer products today.

She knew that earlier studies conducted in test tubes and petri dishes had shown the same particle could cause disease. But her tests at a lab at UCLA’s School of Public Health were in vivo — conducted in living organisms — and thus regarded by some scientists as more relevant in assessing potential human harm.

Halfway through, Trouiller became alarmed: Consuming the nano-titanium dioxide was damaging or destroying the animals’ DNA and chromosomes. The biological havoc continued as she repeated the studies again and again. It was a significant finding: The degrees of DNA damage and genetic instability that the 32-year-old investigator documented can be “linked to all the big killers of man, namely cancer, heart disease, neurological disease and aging,” says Professor Robert Schiestl, a genetic toxicologist who ran the lab at UCLA’s School of Public Health where Trouiller did her research.

Nano-titanium dioxide is so pervasive that the Environmental Working Group says it has calculated that close to 10,000 over-the-counter products use it in one form or another. Other public health specialists put the number even higher. It’s “in everything from medicine capsules and nutritional supplements, to food icing and additives, to skin creams, oils and toothpaste,” Schiestl says. He adds that at least 2 million pounds of nanosized titanium dioxide are produced and used in the U.S. each year.

What’s more, the particles Trouiller gave the mice to drink are just one of an endless number of engineered, atom-size structures that have been or can be made. And a number of those nanomaterials have also been shown in published, peer-reviewed studies (more than 170 from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health alone) to potentially cause harm as well. Researchers have found, for instance, that carbon nanotubes — widely used in many industrial applications — can penetrate the lungs more deeply than asbestos and appear to cause asbestos-like, often-fatal damage more rapidly. Other nanoparticles, especially those composed of metal-chemical combinations, can cause cancer and birth defects; lead to harmful buildups in the circulatory system; and damage the heart, liver and other organs of lab animals.

Yet despite those findings, most federal agencies are doing little to nothing to ensure public safety. Consumers have virtually no way of knowing whether the products they purchase contain nanomaterials, as under current U.S. laws it is completely up to manufacturers what to put on their labels. And hundreds of interviews conducted by AOL News’ senior public health correspondent over the past 15 months make it clear that movement in the government’s efforts to institute safety rules and regulations for use of nanomaterials is often as flat as the read-out on a snowman’s heart monitor.

“How long should the public have to wait before the government takes protective action?” says Jaydee Hanson, senior policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety. “Must the bodies stack up first?”

Big Promise Comes With Potential Perils

“Nano” comes from the Greek word for dwarf, though that falls short of conveying the true scale of this new world: Draw a line 1 inch long, and 25 million nanoparticles can fit between its beginning and end.

Apart from the materials’ size, everything about nanotechnology is huge. According to the federal government and investment analysts, more than 1,300 U.S. businesses and universities are involved in related research and development. The National Science Foundation says that $60 billion to $70 billion of nano-containing products are sold in this country annually, with the majority going to the energy and electronics industries.

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Arctic Seabirds Loaded with Environmental Poisons

October 21st, 2010

Natural News

By: David Gutierrez

The excrement of Arctic seabirds is a cocktail of dangerous pollutants, according to studies conducted by the Canadian Wildlife Service and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.

Because nearly all pollution emitted by industrial societies ends up in the ocean eventually, sea creatures are among the most contaminated organisms on the planet. Sea birds such as terns, eiders and fulmars eat these organisms, thereby creating a “boomerang effect” and bringing many of the toxins back to land.

“At the end of the day, it’s a sad tale, that the oceans are polluted no matter where you are — that’s the bottom line,” said researcher Mark Mallory.

In the most recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, researchers identified one pond used by terns and another used by eiders on Tern Island off the coast of Cornwallis Island. They sampled the sediment from the bottom of each pond and tested them for contaminants. They found significantly elevated levels of cadmium and mercury in the pond used by terns, which eat mostly fish. In the excrement of eiders, which eat mostly shellfish, they found elevated levels of lead, manganese and aluminum.

A prior study, also conducted by Mallory, found elevated levels of PCBs and DDT in the excrement of fulmars on Devon Island, one of the most isolated locations in the world. Concentrations of the chemicals were as much as 60 times higher in ponds used by the birds than in other ponds nearby.

“The birds are like a funnel and they’re concentrating these contaminants, ” researcher John Smol said.

Although researchers say the contaminants found are not concentrated enough to pose a health threat to the indigenous Nunavummiut who eat eiders and the eggs of eiders and terns, they do pose a threat to birds themselves, and to the wider Arctic ecosystem.

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Too Much Fertilizer Is Destroying The Planet

July 13, 2010

Natural News

By: David Gutierrez

Reckless overuse of synthetic fertilizers is creating an ecological catastrophe, warns a recent feature in Grist magazine.

In traditional farming, the nitrogen available in the soil imposes a strict limit on how much food can be grown. Organic methods of nitrogen supplementation include planting certain leguminous (“nitrogen fixing”) crops or manually applying nitrogen in the form of manure or compost.

Yet with the so-called “Green Revolution” after World War II, agronomists widely adopted the Haber-Bosch process for transforming chemically neutral atmospheric nitrogen into the much more volatile ammonia. Ammonia soon became the base for a wide array of fertilizers, allowing farmers to produce much greater yields than had been traditionally possible. This food boom directly fueled the global population explosion of the last 70 years.

Unfortunately, due to its intrinsically volatile nature, so-called reactive nitrogen does not stay where farmers put it — it reacts easily with the elements around it to spread into the air, water and soil. Researchers estimate that as much as 70 percent of applied nitrogen ends up outside of the crops being grown. To make matters worse, farmers typically apply far more fertilizer than they need to, as a sort of insurance to produce the largest yields possible.

Excess nitrogen can actually destroy valuable soil organisms, degrading the soil’s agricultural quantity. It is responsible for the proliferation of aquatic “dead zones,” where agricultural runoff has produced algal blooms that devour oxygen and choke out fish, as well as bacterial blooms that can produce human disease. Other ecological consequences of nitrogen pollution include lake acidification and general habitat degradation.

The effects do not stop there: ammonia production is such an energetically intensive process that fertilizer manufacture actually accounts for a full 1 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Yet all climate bills currently making their way through the U.S. Congress explicitly exempt agricultural emissions from regulation.

Mere climate regulation alone is not the answer, however, notes author Stephanie Ogburn. Only a widescale revisioning of the agricultural system and its emphasis on higher yields can shift the world off the path of nitrogen catastrophe.

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Researchers Find Superbug at Public Beaches

January 14, 2010

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

Public beaches may provide a home for and mechanism for the spread of the superbug methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Washington and presented to the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

“Our results suggest that public beaches may be a reservoir for possible transmission of MRSA,” lead researcher Marilyn Roberts said.

MRSA is a drug-resistant form to the common Staph infection that can lead to severe and even lethal side effects if left untreated. Once a problem largely confined to hospitals, MRSA has spread beyond health care settings in recent years. This new prevalence, combined with its evolved ability to infect healthier people, has led to a situation where MRSA now kills more people in the United States each year than AIDS.

Researchers tested 10 public beaches on the Puget Sound and identified 13 different varieties of Staph bacteria spread over nine of them. Seven of these varieties were multidrug resistant. Five of the MRSA samples appeared most similar to hospital varieties, suggesting that some form of contamination was responsible for their presence.

People may be infected with Staph bacteria without developing symptoms. These carriers can in turn infect others. Carriers may have been responsible for the two MRSA varieties that did not appear to come from hospitals, but the researchers could not be sure.

Roberts said that the MRSA probably entered the beaches due to environmental contamination.

“Where all of these organisms are coming from and how they’re getting seeded (on the beaches) is not clear,” she said. Two beaches tested in southern California were not contaminated.

Nevertheless, the method of sampling that Roberts and colleagues used is not likely to capture every different Staph variety at a given beach.

“The fact that we found these organisms suggests that the amount is much higher than we previously thought,” she said.

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Bayer Admits GMO Contamination is Out of Control

December 18, 2009

Organic Consumers

 Bayer has admitted it has been unable to control the spread of its genetically-engineered organisms despite ‘the best practices [to stop contamination]‘(1). It shows that all outdoors field trials or commercial growing of GE crops must be stopped before our crops are irreversibly contaminated.

$2 million US dollar verdict against Bayer confirms company’s liability for an uncontrollable technology

Greenpeace welcomes the United States federal jury ruling on 4 December 2009 that Bayer CropScience LP must pay $2 million US dollars to two Missouri farmers after their rice crop was contaminated with an experimental variety of rice that the company was testing in 2006.

This verdict confirms that the responsibility for the consequences of GE (genetic engineering) contamination rests with the company that releases GE crops.

Bayer has admitted it has been unable to control the spread of its genetically-engineered organisms despite ‘the best practices [to stop contamination]‘(1). It shows that all outdoors field trials or commercial growing of GE crops must be stopped before our crops are irreversibly contaminated.

A report prepared for Greenpeace International concluded that the total costs incurred throughout the world as a result of the contamination are estimated to range from $741 million to $1.285 billion US dollars.(2) The verdict indicates that Bayer is liable for what could turn out to be a large proportion of these costs, as it awards damages in the first two of more than 1,000 currently pending lawsuits. The decision must be used to support all claims for losses incurred by other US farmers whose crops have suffered from GE contamination.

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