Photo by All Word News.UK

“Because the nanopatch requires neither a trained practitioner to administer it nor refrigeration, it has enormous potential to cheaply deliver vaccines in developing nations,” said lead researcher Mark Kendall, a professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

Being both painless and needle-free, Kendall said in a statement released by the university, the nanopatch offers hope for those with needle phobia, as well as the potential to improve the vaccination experience for young children.

Kendall told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the nanopatch is designed to place vaccines directly into the skin where a “rich body of immune cells are,”  unlike the needle, which injects vaccines into muscles with few immune cells. As a result, the vaccines delivered via nanopatch are more effective, he said.

The nanopatch targeted cells found in a narrow layer just beneath the skin surface. The patch was “much smaller than a postage stamp and comprised of several thousands of densely packed (nanosized) projections invisible to the human eye,” the professor said.

In tests on laboratory mice, Kendall and his team dry-coated influenza vaccine onto the projections, which are nanosized delivery points, and then applied the patches to the animals’ skin for two minutes, all it took for the full dosage to be delivered.

“Our result is 10 times better than the best results achieved by other delivery methods,” being developed elsewhere around the globe, he said.  “And by using far less vaccine we believe that the Nanopatch will enable the vaccination of many more people,” Kendall said.

“When compared to a needle and syringe a nanopatch is cheap to produce and it is easy to imagine a situation in which a government might provide vaccinations for a pandemic such as swine flu to be collected from a (pharmacist) or sent in the mail,” said the announcement.

“Our next step is to prove the effectiveness of nanopatches in human clinical trials,” he said.

Here’s a link to the version I wrote for AOLnewa.com.

Photo Spice Co.

After months of research, the Government Accountability Office told Congress it was concerned about a well-known loophole in the Food and Drug Administration regulations that for decades has concerned consumer and public health advocates.

It deals with a often controversial exception to the FDA’s practice of demanding rigorous analysis of the contents of processed food. Immunity from the FDA’s scrutiny is bestowed with the four word designation of “generally regarded as safe.”

What this means is that food manufacturers who want to include an additive in a food product are often spared having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in safety tests and can save years in getting something on to store shelves.

The GAO determined that:

• FDA generally doesn’t know about most of these GRAS determinations because companies are not required to inform the agency.
• FDA has not taken steps that could help ensure the safety of additives listed as GRAS.
• Food products may contain numerous ingredients, including GRAS substances, making it difficult, if not impossible, for public health authorities to attribute a food safety problem to a specific GRAS additives.
• FDA does not systematically reconsider the safety of GRAS substances as new information or new methods for evaluating safety become available.

The investigators also noted that while FDA has issued guidance to minimize the potential for conflicts of interest among its own staff who look at the safety of GRAS substances, it has not issued any restrictions for companies to use with their hired scientific experts.

“There is a relatively small community of experts qualified to sit on the GRAS designation panels and, inevitably, these experts may have corporate or financial affiliations that could bias their decisions,” the report said.

The investigators said it was almost impossible to link adverse effects to GRAS additives because their presence in food is rarely known outside those who produced it.

GAO said that the food safety agency told it that complaints and public concerns could prompt them to reconsider the safety of a GRAS substance.

Yet the FDA’s actions present a different picture.

More than 40 years ago, the GRAS-labeled artificial sweetener cyclamate was banned after allegations of serious health effects. That was pretty much it for decades.

A more serious debate over another GRAS additive is going on today and is generating repeated demands from unions, public health experts and others for another ban.

The substance is diacetyl, a chemical butter flavoring that has killed a handful of workers and sickened hundreds of others in microwave popcorn plants, bakeries, candy makers and other food processors.

What angers worker and food safety specialists even more is that many manufacturers say they have switched to a substitute for the old lung-destroying flavoring additive that government researchers have determined contains just as much or more diacetyl than the old concoction.

It too is listed as GRAS and the FDA knows it, but has done nothing.

Over the past 50 years, thousands of spices, artificial flavors, and binders, vitamins and minerals, and preservatives have been declared as GRAS. These substances are added to enhance a food’s taste, texture, nutritional content, or shelf life.

These safety designations started in 1958, when Congress blessed GRAS by amending the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to say that the safety of an additive “does not need to be established with absolute certainty.”  Rather, the Act said that a scientific panel selected by the manufacturer can rule that no harm will result from the intended use of an additive.

But in reality, the only ones who know whether not the additives are actually safe is the company and its own analysts or the outside labs they hire.

Thousands of exemptions are granted by food industry trade groups. For example, the largest, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association, has bestowed GRAS on more than 2,600 additives since 1960.

The GAO expressed added concern over two specific areas – imported additives, where the level of safety consideration is often completely unknown and the growing use of GRAS designation in engineered nanomaterial in food.

In responding to the report, the FDA says it agreed with many of the faults that GAO documented but said that the agency would have to seek authority from Congress in order to require all companies to inform it of their designation of additives as GRAS.

If that were to happen, FDA said, it could place an added burden on food producers and tax FDA’s resources.

The GAO investigation was requested by two democrats, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin of and Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro.

Here is  a link to an AOLnews version of this story.

It has taken more than a decade of wrangling but the Environmental Protection Agency has finally said pesticide makers must disclose the hidden ingredients in their poisons.

Yesterday, the agency said it was drafting a new rule which will require manufacturers to fess up and identify the estimated 4,000 different “inert” materials in their pesticides.

Marla Cone, the Editor in Chief of Environmental Health News, writes that inert ingredients as anything added to a pesticide that does not kill or control a pest.

“In some cases, those ingredients are toxic and cites formaldehyde, bisphenol A, sulfuric acid, toluene, benzene and styrene as some of the ingredients that are allowed in pesticides but that are not identified on labels.

Pesticide manufacturers and their lobbyists have been voracious and successful in stalling disclosure of these chemicals.

They said they are worried about disclosing proprietary or trade secrets, but health and environmental activists say the companies really fear how the public will react to the information on what’s actually in the widely used pest, weed and fungal poisons.

For example, Cone wrote that a recent study found that one inert substance, called polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, used in the popular herbicide Roundup is more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself.

Year after year, EPA denied or ignored petitions from public health and environmental activists and the attorneys general in at least ten states seeking disclosure of the chemicals. But now the new administration says it plans to draft a rule that will increase transparency, protect public health and encourage companies to replace toxic substances.

“EPA believes disclosure of inert ingredients on product labels is important to consumers who want to be aware of all potentially toxic chemicals, both active and inert ingredients, in pesticide products,” according to the agency’s website.

Jay Vroom, the boss of CropLife America, which is the public voice of the pesticide manufacturers, said he found the EPA decision “just baffling.”

He again told EHN’s Cone that his clients are concerned they will be revealing confidential business information, or trade secrets, about their formulas.

Here is a link to the EPA announcement.

In fact, it appears it never went away, despite promises from the food industry.

So what is the Obama Administration going to do about it? Nothing meaningful, at least for another year, it said this week, stunning unions, members of Congress, public health activists and physicians who have pleaded for government action to protect workers and consumers from the butter flavoring.

Two years ago this month, the nation’s leading popcorn purveyors proclaimed that they’d done away with the chemical culprit diacetyl, believed to be the harmful element in the food flavoring.

But now, government health investigators are reporting that the “new, safer, butter substitutes” are, in some cases, at least as toxic as what they replaced.

Even the top lawyer for the flavoring industry said his organization has told anyone that would listen that diacetyl substitutes are actually just another form of diacetyl.

“We’ve been very clear to flavor manufacturers, food companies and regulators that these so-called substitutes are diacetyl,” said John Hallagan, General Counsel for the Flavors and Extracts Manufacturers Association.

Hallagan told me this week that his trade association discouraged food manufacturers from using these materials and calling their products “diacetyl-free.” But he quickly admitted that his group has no legal authority to prohibit their use.

That’s up to the food manufacturers.”

But those companies refused to discuss the source of the butter flavoring in their products. But their food scientists and flavorists openly debate it at professional meetings as they sought their peer’s opinions on the value of starter distillates and trimers they were using to achieve the rich butter flavors that consumers love so much.

But federal health investigators, many of whom had chased the dangerous additive for years, had concluded that these butter surrogates may be unsafe.

“The inclusion of these alternative substances neither eliminate diacetyl nor assure safety for workers,’’

physicians from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health – Drs. Kathleen Kreiss and Nancy Sahakian – wrote earlier this year. Their agency has led the way in chasing which flavoring agents were sickening factory workers.

On the same trail was Dr. Daniel Morgan, with the Respiratory Toxicity Group at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.   On Monday he told me he had found the same danger in one of the principle components of the butter substitute – a concoction called 2,3-pentanedione.

“It caused the same injuries in test animals as diacetyl and our preliminary data indicates the toxicity is close to identical,” Morgan said.

“We don’t really know what industry is using as a substitute in these ‘diacetyl-free’ items. But, if 2,3-pentanedione was being used, it’s being done without toxicity data.”

The disease from exposure to diacetyl – bronchiolitis obliterans – is debilitating and potentially fatal. It irreversibly destroys the small airways in the lung. The only hope for many is a hard-to-get single or double lung transplant.

It was almost ten years ago, the holiday season, that Dr. Allen Parmet, a really sharp occupational medicine doc, used his experience treating victims of a rocket fuel accident to figured out that workers at a Missouri microwave popcorn plant were having their lungs destroyed by some chemical used at the facility.

A team from NIOSH quickly pointed to diacetyl as the likely villain.

Over the years, unions, congress, scores of physicians and scientists and occupational health experts called on OSHA to take action.

In June 2006, Rep. Hilda Solis, a Democrat who represented the Los Angeles district where two stricken flavoring plant workers lived, reacted to media reports on their illness and demanded that that OSHA do more to protect workers.

“”These illnesses and deaths are preventable,” Solis said at the time. “Further inaction is inexcusable.”

Public health advocates told themselves that when Democrats took over the health and safety agencies the Bush regulations-are-bad-era would vaporize. One measurement  was going to be how quickly the Obama team addressed something diacetyl.

Well, this week the new Labor Secretary, who now happens to be Hilda Solis, addressed it.

She released her plans for worker health and safety, mentioning several specific hazards, including diacetyl.

But instead of expediting carefully crafted rules for diacetyl and worker safety, she ordered another year of bureaucratic review of diacetyl’s health effects.

You’ve got to wonder what really happened to Solis’ great concern for workers exposed to diacetyl.

For a longer version of this story, check out what I wrote on AOL News – Sphere.com.

About 400 physicians gathered in Lansing to hear top doctors and senior insurance officials lay out a pioneering plan to detect and treat cancers.

Depending on what studies you read, somewhere between 30 percent and 80 percent of all cancers are caused by exposure to cancer-causing agents in the workplace or the environment. This is what this unique program strives to halt.

In a marriage more typically found in hell, Blue Cross-Blue Shield and Michigan’s largest cancer center – Karmanos Cancer Institute – linked up to attack cancers caused by exposure to arsenic, asbestos and radon.

The broker of this unlikely wedding was Dr. Michael Harbut, a leading specialist in occupational and environmental cancers who is co-Director of the National Center for Vermiculite/Asbestos-Related Cancers at Karmanos.

He told me about the plan a few months ago at a great Chinese restaurant in Seattle’s International District.  His enthusiasm was so infectious that the cook peered out the door to watch.

“It’s so simple” he gushed. “We know arsenic and asbestos kills. If we can find the cancer early and treat it, lives will be saved.

“If we can discover that the patients are being exposed to arsenic in their drinking water and give them clean water, lives will be saved.”

“There is nothing magic about this,” the doctor said, “it’s just medicine being practiced properly without political games.”

The plan says that over the next 18-months, the Blues and Karmanos will recruit and train about 3,000 MDs. They will pay them $500 to take the training and pay them again to test symptom-free patients to determine whether they have or may get cancer.

The docs will conduct relatively inexpensive urine tests to see whether their patients have been exposed to arsenic. If so, the insurance company will pay for special filters to remove arsenic from drinking water. If that’s not practical, bottled water will be supplied.

Yes, the Blues will lay out a lot of money in this program. But it will be just a tiny friction of what the medical care would cost if the cancers fully developed.

So both money and lives are saved. What an idea.

For a more detailed version of this story see what I wrote on Sphere.com

Nine women from California, Oregon and Washington found out that was just what happened, but they learned it after their babies were born.

They were participants in a first-of-its-kind study that tested their blood and urine during their second trimester of pregnancy to find out whether their unborn offspring were being exposed to toxic chemicals found in common consumer products.

The study concluded that children spend their first nine months in an environment that exposes them to known toxic chemicals.

“Our tests measured levels of five chemical groups, including phthalates, mercury, perfluorinated compounds or bisphenol A, and the flame retardant tetrabromobisphenol A,” said Erika Schreder, staff scientist for the Washington Toxics Coalition, one of the three West Coast environmental health organizations who conducted the study.

Thirteen toxic chemicals were found in the bio-fluids of the pregnant women and that research has proven that exposure to some of these chemicals has been linked to serious health problems like asthma, childhood cancers, diabetes, infertility and learning disabilities.

However, the report does not offer a correlation between the levels of the chemicals found in the mothers and any health problems the newborns were expected to encounter.

“We cannot say with certainty whether these particular babies were harmed by the toxic exposures in the womb because of the complexity of their exposures…,” Schreder told me in an interview.

“We do know that they were exposed during the very most vulnerable time in their lives to chemicals associated with cancer, learning disabilities, and infertility,” she added.

Most of the mothers were stunned and angered at the results of the testing.

Amanda Estrada-Guzman, a nurse from Richland, Wash.,  said “The results were shocking and eye opening. I was scared and worried how this will affect my baby.”

Alma Feldpausch, an environmental scientist from Seattle said that “I would indeed expect our government agencies to work to reduce these chemicals.”

Kim Radtke, a program manager in a Seattle breast feeding advocacy program, said “Babies deserve to grow and develop in a healthy environment, in utero and out.”

The three groups that produced the report and other public health and environmental activists across the country say that to adequately protect not just pregnant women, but all of the public, immediate steps must be taken by the government beginning with the passage of laws that protect the most vulnerable.

Here is a link to a longer version of this story on AOL’s Sphere.com.

The 50,000-member American Public Health Association adopted a resolution at its annual meeting this week calling on Congress to pass legislation banning the manufacture, sale, export, or import of asbestos-containing products including products in which asbestos is a contaminant.

Asbestos, a known carcinogen, annually claims the lives of more than 10,000 Americans.

“With this new policy, APHA is joining the World Federation of Public Health Associations and other international organizations calling for a global ban on asbestos mining, and manufacturing, and the dangerous practice of exporting asbestos containing products,” said Dr. Celeste Monforton, chair of the organization’s Occupational Health and Safety section.

“As the World Health Organization noted in 2006, the most efficient way to eliminate asbestos related diseases is to stop using all types of asbestos.”

Asbestos was banned in the U.S. briefly in 1989, after the Environmental Protection Agency conducted a ten-year study, spent millions in research and accumulated 100,000 pages of justification. The agency announced that it would phase out and ban virtually all products containing asbestos

But the fledgling ban lasted less than two years. The well-funded Canadian Asbestos industry challenged the ban. The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court acknowledged that “asbestos is a potential carcinogen at all levels of exposure,” but nevertheless threw out the life-saving legislation over technical issues.

In 2007, after six years of effort, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray muscled a new asbestos ban into existence.

The original language of the precisely crafted legislation would have addressed almost all commercial sources of asbestos. However, between Murray signing off on a solid and important bill and the time it was passed unanimously by the Senate, the asbestos industry, primary the automotive and sand and gravel gangs, had Republicans gut it to almost total uselessness.

Almost 50 industrialized nations have banned the lethal fibers. The U.S. and Canada are the most notable exceptions.  Canada still mines and exports asbestos and too many U.S. lawmakers buckle to the power of industry lobbyists.

Yet like Murray, many continue the fight.

“APHA set a precedent with strong language aimed at preventing asbestos exposure to eliminate deadly diseases.  We can’t let history repeat itself – it is time to ban asbestos and fund educational and research programs,” says Linda Reinstein, Executive Director of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

“APHA renews our optimism that a federal asbestos ban is eminent,” added the head of the asbestos victim’s group.

You have to wonder a bit about the Environmental Protection Agency’s often-stated promise of transparency and openness to its employee’s opinions.

It appears that the rigidness that marked much of the Bush administration’s control of the EPA has returned, as the agency has threatened “disciplinary action” against two of its lawyers for comments they made in a video they posted on YouTube.

The video, entitled “The Huge Mistake,” was made by EPA enforcement lawyers Laurie Williams and her husband, Allan Zabel. The pair stressed their views were personal and did not represent the EPA.

Their video explains why the agency’s “cap & trade” will not accomplish its goals, let alone effectively curb climate change.

The proposed controversial “cap and trade” plan is part of the effort to reduce carbon emissions which are believed to be the leading cause of global warming.

The plan would set a limit, or cap, on nationwide carbon emissions, but companies could buy “pollution credits” if they wanted to exceed the cap.

You’ve got to wonder when the American Petroleum Institute and Greenpeace are both against the plan. However, I don’t want to debate the merits of the plan, but rather EPA’s efforts to stifle its experts from talking publically.

Last week, EPA ethics officials gave the two veteran employees 24 hours to make specific changes to the video. Mostly the agency demanded that all references to the lawyer’s work be deleted. Here are some of the edits that were to be made:

◦                                 Removing the language starting at 1:06 min – ‘Our opinions are based on more than 20 years each working as attorneys at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco Regional Office.’

◦                                 (ii) Removing the images of EPA’s building starting at 1:06 min…

◦                                 (v) Remove [sic] the language starting at 6:30 min – ‘In my work at EPA, I’ve been overseeing California’s cap-and-trade and offset programs for more than 20 years.’”

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an organization representing the interest of government environmental professionals, has reposted the original video onto YouTube.

“How is government supposed to be transparent when public servants are forbidden from discussing the nature of their work?” asked PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch.

““EPA is abusing ethics rules to gag two conscientious employees who have every right to speak out as citizens,” Ruch said in a statement today.

It was just in August that EPA Administrator Jackson issued a statement to employees saying the agency will operate as if in a “fishbowl,” a new openness.

I spoke to an EPA Congressional liaison today who said that the agency requires that all public statements be approved before they’re released.

PEER’s Ruch says that some federal agencies such as the Fish & Wildlife Service have dispensed with any pre-approval of employees’ unofficial expressions, as long as they are accompanied by a short disclaimer.

Here is a link to EPA’s list of changes it wanted made to the video.

Photo by nanotech companies

The infinitesimal particles are at the core of a burgeoning new industry that has scores of businesses lining up outside laboratory doors, eager to apply nanotechnology to commercial projects, from cosmetics to antibacterial clothing to targeted delivery of pharmaceuticals.

But many scientists have raised serious questions about the health and environmental dangers posed by nanoparticles  and the British study could elevate those concerns to a new plane. However, other researchers insist the conclusions are off-base an dnot relevant when assessing human health risks.

Vital organs and systems in the human body are protected by specialized barriers. The blood-brain barrier, for example, blocks the release of large molecules and other substances from the blood stream into cerebrospinal fluid.

The British scientists – Patrick Case and 15 other researchers from the University of Bristol – studied the ability of nanoparticles to penetrate past such barriers.

What they found was that nanoparticles used medically to target the delivery of drugs against cancer and other diseases can damage the DNA of cells without actually crossing the cellular barriers in the body.

This opens a very wide door to new safety concerns.

The study, conducted on cells grown in culture, suggests that the indirect effects of nanoparticles on cells should be weighed when evaluating their safety.

In an abstract of the study published online this week in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers reported that the nanoparticles did not pass through the barrier to cause the DNA damage, but in fact generated molecules within the barrier cells that were then transmitted to the cells behind the barrier.

The amount of DNA damage in the cells behind the protective barrier was similar to the DNA damage caused by direct exposure to the nanoparticles.

Almost two decades ago, when French cosmetic designers were the first to use nanosized material in face powers and creams, some skeptics raised concerns about the nanomaterial entering the blood system and eventually passing into the brain.

Scientists for the cosmetic said the brain-blood barrier would prevent such contamination. Perhaps, based on Case’s work, that issue deserves another look.

NEW:

It didn’t take long for Case’s study to draw criticism from other scientists that faulted its conclusions and side the word of the British team had little relevance to human exposure risk.  .

Here is a link to a critical article in Science Now.

Little is known about the health effects of these inventions.

“We have no idea how some of these structures interact in biological systems — nor do we understand the potential toxicological risks they impose on our environment,”  says James Bonner, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology at North Carolina State University

An Environmental Protection Agency science panel began a four-day hearing Tuesday in Washington examining the hazards associated with the odor-ending nanosilver.

Those concerns will also be underscored this week when Swiss scientists release what they say is the first comprehensive study on the escape of silver nanoparticles from clothing to rivers, streams and lakes, often major sources of drinking water.

Textile manufactures are cranking out millions of pairs of sweet-smelling bras, panties, socks, undershirts and other clothing that are spiked with nanosilver, advertising the garments as containing odor and germ-fighting material.

In the Swiss study, being published this week in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science & Technology, the scientists measured the nanosilver particles released from a variety of brands of socks made from different textiles, finding that most of were relatively large and that as much as 35 percent of the total silver came out of the fabrics during the first wash.

Most filters in water treatment plants are unable to screen out the nano-sized particles of silver, which may be no thicker than 1/50,000^th the width of a human hair.

“These results have important implications for the risk assessment of silver textiles and also for environmental fate studies of nanosilver,” said Dr. Bernd Nowack and his colleagues from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research.

For decades, scientists have shown that silver in many forms has great medicinal effects, including being toxic to most bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

While silver is useful, there is growing concern that no one has yet completed, or, at least published research on whether nano-sized silver in the water may harm the environment or the people and animals who drink it.

While this study dealt with a clothes hamper of socks, to understand the potential size of the problem, consider that there are thousands of individual items being sold that tout nanosilver as an antibacterial agent.

The Internet is filled with hundreds of products from underwear for astronauts, campers and hikers, to thongs, frilly bras and hospital scrubs.

The anti-odor, anti-bacterial clothing is selling well around the world and new lines of products are being added almost weekly.

The Internet offers page after page of the latest nanosilver products for sale. One clothing website based in Wisconsin described its presentation as “scantily clad models who we can be sure smell as good as they look.”

But it’s infants and children that give marketers their biggest payday.  They count on new parents’ fears of germs to sell an almost endless list of products that will kill the bugs on things their offspring may put in their mouths.

Plush dog with antimicrobial nanosilver

But nanosilver products didn’t slink quietly into the marketplace.

The Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung had a Hollywood-style gala to launch its “Silver Wash” clothes washer with a nanosilver-coated drum that it said it would kill over 600 different bacteria.

Most of the high end women’s and design magazines had slick ads proclaiming that the ‘Silver Wash’ “released 400 billion nanoscale silver particles during the wash and rinse cycles and achieved 99.9 percent sterilization of bacteria.’’ It boast leaving behind a residual silver coating on clothing “to keep it smelling fresh for up to 30 days.”

So when you think about  what’s going out with the rinse water,  think bigger than a few pair of socks.

Andrew Maynard, Chief Science Advisor for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, warned Congress last year that hundreds of products with nanoparticles are on the market, with three to five new ones added every week.

“What we know at the moment is that silver does have the potential to cause environmental harm if released in sufficient quantities, and that silver used as nanoparticles might exacerbate the problem in some circumstances,” he told me this weekend.

He is concerned that current research won’t provide a clear picture of potential risks presented by nanoscale silver for some time.

“And it’s not even clear whether the right research is being funded – in other words, there’s a disconnect between where we need to be on nanosilver, and what we are doing to get there,” added Maynard, who’s at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

In June 2008, The International Center for Technology Assessment and a coalition of consumer, health, and environmental groups filed a petition with the EPA demanding the agency use its pesticide regulation authority to stop the sale of hundreds of consumer products now using nano-sized versions of silver.

No one involved in the nano safety fight could tell me of any products that EPA pulled off the market. But, under powers of the almost unpronounceable Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, EPA declared Samsung’s “Silver Wash” a pesticide.

The EPA’s nano Scientific Advisory Panel will be evaluating statements on the “Assessment of Hazard and Exposure Associated with Nanosilver.”

The panel will hear from scientists, toxicologists, public health specialists and representative of the nanosilver industry.

Here are three of the many topics they are likely to debate, or at least consider as they ponder what regulations this multi-billion dollar industry needs and will accept:

• An antibacterial agent like nanosilver is a pesticide. It kills bugs.

• Not only does nanosilver kill harmful bacteria, but it doesn’t distinguish between good and bad bacteria.  This means it will also kill microbes that water treatment plants need to operate and that we need to live.

• The potential hazards associated with exposure to nano particles – both metals and chemicals – are likely to differ from the same substance that hasn’t been reduced in size.

The most common reply when nano scientists and marketers are asked about the safety of their almost invisible creations is something like: “Well, we know the toxicity limits for (insert chemical of your choice) Why should we test it just because we’ve made it smaller?”

Many toxicologists and public health specialists disagree.

“Unfortunately, that’s the mantra,” said PEN scientist Maynard. “One size fits all is not a viable concept when it comes to assessing risk or toxicity of any substance.”

Dr. Jennifer Sass, senior scientist and nano specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council has long been concerned about the toxicity of nano particles.

In material she submitted to the EPA panel, Sass said that unless multiple, well-designed studies demonstrate otherwise, nanosized material should not be automatically declared safe.

Sass, who for years has studied EPA and industry’s testing for children’s exposure to toxic material, says that NRDC is particularly concerned about exposures to infants and children through the use of nanosilver and other nano-chemical antimicrobials.

Many who will attend the hearings or who submitted testimony believe passionately that no new government regulations are needed.

For example, some groups that sell cosmetics or nutritional or medical supplements made with silver are adamantly against EPA imposing any controls on silver products. They insist that nutritional supplements containing nanosilver have never been demonstrated to pose any threat to the environment.

Other federal and state agencies will be watching the outcome of the EPA’s effort.

Almost everyone sees the enormous actual and potential benefit to medicine, engineering and a hundred other fields from the advances in nanotechnology.  But many people in government, public health and the nano industry worry that there must be some mechanism to weigh the benefits against what could be an enormous risk.