Nobody Knows What Nanoparticles Do - Yet They Are in Your Food, Cosmetics, and Toys

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Not even the world's leading nanoscientists know what nanoparticles do inside the body or the environment.

Carole Bass
July 11, 2009 - E Magazine

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It's a beautiful summer day. You pull on your stain-resistant cargo shorts and odor-resistant hiking socks, gulp down an energy-boosting supplement, slather yourself with sunscreen and head out for a ramble in the woods. Are you poisoning yourself? When you get home, you jump in the shower and toss your clothes in the wash. Are you poisoning the environment? Maybe.

Your sunscreen, energy drink and high-tech clothing may be among the 800-plus consumer products made with nanomaterials: those manufactured at the scale of atoms and molecules. Sunscreen that turns clear on the skin contains titanium dioxide, an ordinary UV-blocker in extraordinarily small particles. Odor-eating socks are made with atoms of germ-killing silver. Supplement makers boast of amazing health effects from swallowing nanosolutions that are completely untested for effectiveness or safety. And that stain-repellant clothing? The manufacturer won't even tell you what nanomaterials are in it.

The problem is not just that you, the consumer, don't know what's in the products you use. The much bigger problem is that at the nanoscale, common substances behave in uncommon ways. And nobody--not even the world's leading nanoscientists--knows what nanoparticles do inside the body or in the environment.

Nanotechnology, a fast-growing global industry, is essentially unregulated. Advocates and independent scientists agree that we need to get ahead of the risks before it's too late. Some call for a moratorium on the riskiest nanoproducts. Some say we just need more research, and more protection for workers in the meantime. All are worried about unleashing a powerful new technology that could have vast unintended consquences. Nanomaterials are in food, cosmetics, clothing, toys and scores of other everyday products. Yet when it comes to trying to get a handle on them, we can't answer the most basic questions. What companies are using nanomaterials, and where? What kinds, and in what amounts? How much of the potentially hazardous stuff is escaping into the air, water and soil? Into our food and drinks? Nobody knows.

At a February workshop on what research is needed to better understand nanorisks, speaker after speaker presented questions without answers. Rutgers University environmental scientist Paul Lioy, assigned to talk about human exposures to nanomaterials, was especially blunt.

"This is basically virgin territory," he said. "The fact that it's virgin territory is not good for the field, and it should be fixed really quick."

Big Benefits, Big Risks?

Nanomaterials are not new. Some exist naturally, and others result from combustion--like the ultrafine particles in diesel exhaust that have been linked to respiratory and heart diseases.

What's new is nanotechnology, the ability to manufacture and manipulate minuscule materials into forms such as quantum dots, spherical buckyballs, and cylindrical carbon nanotubes. These engineered nanomaterials take on unusual properties: changing color, for example, or becoming electrically conductive, or penetrating cell walls. And they have many uses. Carbon nanotubes, or CNTs--made by rolling up sheets of graphite just one atom thick--are extremely light and strong; they show up in high-end tennis rackets and bicycle frames. Nanosilver is used as an antimicrobial agent in everything from paint to toothpaste to teddy bears. Nanometal oxides are blended into ceramics and coatings, making them more durable.

While there's no universal definition, the "nano" moniker generally covers materials between one and 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or between 50,000 and 100,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Nanotech offers enormous potential benefits. Medical researchers are investigating ways to use nanomaterials to target tumors and then deliver tiny amounts of drugs directly inside the cancer cells, sparing the healthy cells. Possible green tech applications include cheaper, more efficient solar panels and water-filtration systems, energy-saving batteries and lighter vehicles that use less fuel.

That's the upside. But exciting new wonder materials often reveal a dark side, too. Asbestos--now synonymous with bankrutpcy-inducing lawsuits and slow, painful death--was once seen as a miraculous fireproofing agent that would save millions of lives. Much of its damage could have been avoided if industry and government had heeded the ample danger signs. Now, early research on the potential hazards of nanotech is producing danger signs of its own. Workers handling nanomaterials face the biggest risks. But there are concerns for consumers, too, especially with products--like cosmetics, food and supplements--that go directly on or in the body. And with potentially toxic nanomaterials washing down the drain and into the water and soil, there's reason to worry about environmental damage as well.

Yet studies on nanotech's downside are a mere nanospeck compared to the research that's being done on how this technology can benefit humanity--and corporate profits. Of $1.5 billion in federal nano spending each year, only between 1% and 2.5% goes toward studying environmental, health and safety risks. Worse, there's no national strategy for deciding what questions need to be answered, or what to do with those answers as they arrive.

Occupational Hazards

Since the 17th century, when Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini pioneered the field of occupational medicine, researchers have looked to the workplace for advance warning of new illnesses. From janitors blinded by ammonia fumes to chimney sweeps who absorbed cancer-causing soot through their skin, workers get sick first and most acutely because of their intense, daily toxic exposures. That's why much of the still-sparse nano health and safety research has focused on the possible hazards of working with nanomaterials. Scientists can't expose workers to potential toxins and watch to see if they keel over. But if employers cooperate, researchers can find out what materials workers are using, in what amounts and forms, and under what conditions. Then they can simulate those exposures with lab animals.

Some studies find little or no risk. Others are alarming. Last year, British researchers reported that when long, straight carbon nanotubes--shaped like asbestos fibers--were injected into mice, they caused the same kind of damage as asbestos. Of course, workers wouldn't ordinarily stick themselves with a needleful of CNTs. But a follow-up study this year, by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), found that when mice inhaled CNTs, the tiny tubes migrated from their lungs to the surrounding tissue--the very spot where asbestos causes the rare cancer known as mesothelioma. One reason nanomaterials can cause trouble is that they are small enough to evade the body's defenses. In a University of Rochester study of the accidental nanoparticles known as ultrafine pollution, they bypassed the protective blood-brain barrier and slipped directly into the brain's olfactory bulb. Other research demonstrates that nanomaterials can
penetrate the deepest part of the lungs. From there, they cross into the bloodstream and various organs.

Based on evidence like this, the European Union's occupational health and safety agency issued an expert report in March, citing nanoparticles as the number-one emerging risk to workers. In the U.S., NIOSH has issued a guidance document urging employers to avoid exposing workers to nanomaterials--for example, by enclosing equipment and using ventilation to reduce dust and fumes. But NIOSH has no regulatory power; it can only suggest.

The Pig-Pen Effect

"You're producing a personal cloud of exposure," Paul Lioy warned. "Every time you breathe. Every time you move. If the materials you're wearing have [nano]materials that can be released, they will be released. It's basically the Pig-Pen effect.

Lioy, the Rutgers environmental scientist, was speaking theoretically. His audience was fellow scientists, gathered in Bethesda, Maryland, for a workshop sponsored by the federal government. The workshop's title: "Human & Environmental Exposure Assessment of Nanomaterials." Lioy's assignment: Talk about the need for research to "characterize exposure to the general population from industrial processes and industrial and consumer products containing nanomaterials." His message: There is no research on whether and how the general population is exposed to nanomaterials. Searching the scholarly literature, Lioy's associates "spent hours looking for data ... and found nothing," he said.

While workers are on the front lines of nanoexposure, Lioy cautioned against ignoring consumer exposures. "We are all in contact with it--300 million of us, if we use products that have nanoparticles," he declared. And while nanomaterials that are embedded in a hard surface like a computer keyboard are probably not a big worry, clothing and cosmetics might be a different story, he said. That's where his comparison to Pig-Pen, the Peanuts character forever surrounded by a cloud of dirt, comes in: the idea that every time we move, nanoparticles might come loose from our moisturizer or our stain-resistant togs.

Noting that "a lot of nanoparticle uses are terrific," Lioy said he doesn't want society to do without. As scientists do the necessary studies, "I think a lot of issues will go away," he said. "I just don't want unintended consequences."

Down the Drain

Cyndee Gruden is getting the poop on nano-pollution--literally.

One of the main environmental concerns about nanomaterials is what happens when they wash out of clothing, hair or skin and go down the drain. Do they harm aquatic life? Do they interfere with wastewater treatment?

Gruden, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toledo in Ohio, is tackling part of that last question by looking at the effects of two nanometals--titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, used in sunscreens, paint and other products--on bacteria.

Metals "can be toxic to microorganisms," she notes. "In fact, that's specifically what they're for" in consumer products: to inhibit mold, mildew and other nastiness. But when nanometals make their way to a sewage treatment plant, Gruden worries that they might harm the beneficial bacteria that break down what's delicately known in the business as "biosolids."

Her preliminary findings, which she presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society (an academic group, not an industry organization) in March, are mixed. Nano-titanium dioxide damaged bacteria, causing cell walls to break at "relatively low concentrations," similar to what you might see at a sewage treatment plant, Gruden says in an interview. But "in terms of function, what does that mean? Are the bugs able to do what they're supposed to do?"

To answer that question, she added some biosolids to her test tubes and measured how much methane the bacteria produced as they digested for five days. The titanium dioxide didn't seem to slow the bugs down; in fact, methane production actually increased. But when Gruden added nano-zinc oxide, gas production slowed down. She's running more experiments this summer to see what happens when the bacteria are exposed to the bugs for a full 30 days.

"The take-home message for me is, the behavior of these particles is very complex," Gruden says. "When you take a nanoparticle and put it into the environment, you have to know how it's going to behave. And we don't."

One metal Gruden didn't look at is nanosilver, widely used as a microbe-killer. The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C., maintains an inventory of more than 800 consumer products advertised as using nanotechnology. Silver is by far the most frequently identified material.

In an experiment publicized last year, Arizona State University graduate student Troy Benn bought nanosilver-containing socks off the Internet and simulated washing them in jars of water. He found that, for several brands, most or all of the silver disappeared in just a few washings. Silver has been used to kill bacteria since ancient times, when the Greeks found that wine stayed fresh longer in vessels lined with the precious metal. It's potent enough that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates silver as a pesticide. Which raises the question: What does nanosilver do to the "good bugs" downstream, at the sewage treatment plant and elsewhere?

In 2006, a trade organization of wastewater treatment operators was concerned enough about a new silver-ion-emitting Samsung washing machine to pressure the EPA to include such equipment under its pesticide rules. The EPA responded by cracking down, not only on the washer but also on manufacturers of products advertised to contain nanosilver, including a line of supposedly sanitary computer peripherals. Separately, a coalition of consumer, health, and environmental groups filed a petition last year asking the EPA to impose a moratorium on nanosilver products until more safety research is done. In addition, the EPA has awarded a grant to Arizona State researchers to investigate interactions between various kinds of nanomaterials and wastewater biosolids.

Oversight or Overlooked?

In the U.S., the EPA has emerged as the lead agency on nano oversight. But that's not saying much. It is wrestling with the possible risks of nanomaterials, but so far has taken almost no action to regulate them.

In a voluntary Nanoscale Materials Stewardship Program, the EPA asked companies to submit information about what nanomaterials they're using. Very few did, and even the companies that participated withheld large amounts of data as business secrets. This March, the EPA began requiring manufacturers of carbon nanotubes to file pre-manufacturing notices under the Toxic Substances Control Act. California is requiring carbon nanotube makers to share their environmental, health and safety test data with the state, and is considering imposing the same mandate on makers of nanometal oxides, like the ones Gruden is testing.

But the EPA is not the only federal agency with responsibility for nanomaterials. Cosmetics, sunscreen, and food and beverages--which fall under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)--make up roughly 30% of PEN's consumer products inventory. Yet the FDA is poorly equipped to ensure the safety of nano-containing dietary supplements, according to a 2008 report by two former agency officials. (Friends of the Earth has urged mandatory labeling of nanofoods and a moratorium on nano-containing cosmetics until they're shown to be safe.) The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is responsible for protecting workers, has not even begun to work on nano rules.

A former EPA official, J. Clarence Davies, proposes merging all these agencies and more into a new Department of Environmental and Consumer Protection. A "scientific agency with a strong oversight component," it would cover products, pollution, workplace health and safety, climate change and health effects of nanotechnology as well as other technologies, Davies writes in his April 2009 report, "Oversight of Next Generation Nanotechnology."

Outside the U. S., regulators are taking a somewhat more precautionary approach. Still, governments have adopted very few nano-specific rules to protect people or the environment. But there are bright spots. At Rice University in Houston, Texas, for example, Vicki Colvin and her colleagues are trying to engineer nanomaterials that are safe from the get-go, rather than looking for ways to minimize harm from nanotoxins.

But fears abound that the teeny genie is escaping from its bottle. The asbestos parallel causes particular concern--prompting the Australian Council of Trade Unions, for example, to call for that country to adopt nano regulations by year's end. At the Bethesda workshop in February, Harvard industrial hygienist Robert Herrick advocated an all-out effort to gather information about nano exposures and possible related illnesses. The asbestos industry could have undertaken a similar effort in the 1930s, he noted. Instead, industry execs decided to keep the subject quiet. If they had gone the other way, Herrick wondered, "how different would history be?"

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Carole Bass, a journalist, writes about the environment, workplace health, legal affairs and other subjects.

Exclusive: Robert McNamara deceived LBJ on Gulf of Tonkin

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Official government documents reveal new side of defense secretary's legacy

Gareth Porter
July 8, 2009 - Raw Story

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Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967, took many secrets with him when he died Monday at 93. But probably no secret was more sensitive politically than the one that would have changed fundamentally the public perception of his role in Vietnam policy had it been become widely known.

The secret was his deliberate deceit of President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 4, 1964 regarding the alleged attack on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Documents which have been available for decades in the LBJ Library show clearly that McNamara failed to inform Johnson that the U.S. naval task group commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, had changed his mind about the alleged North Vietnamese torpedo attack on U.S. warships he had reported earlier that day.

By early afternoon Washington time, Herrick had reported to the Commander in Chief Pacific in Honolulu that "freak weather effects" on the ship's radar had made such an attack questionable. In fact, Herrick was now saying, in a message sent at 1:27 pm Washington time, that no North Vietnamese patrol boats had actually been sighted. Herrick now proposed a "complete evaluation before any further action taken."

These documents were reviewed by this reporter in researching my book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

McNamara later testified that he had read the message after his return to the Pentagon that afternoon. But he did not immediately call Johnson to tell him that the whole premise of his decision at lunch to approve McNamara's recommendation for retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam was now highly questionable.

In fact, no call from McNamara to Johnson was recorded until 3:51 pm – 7 minutes after Johnson called him from his private quarters. Had Johnson been accurately informed about the Herrick message, he might have demanded fuller information before proceeding with a broadening of the war. Johnson had fended off proposals from McNamara and other advisers for a policy of bombing the North on four separate occasions since becoming President.

But when McNamara called Pacific Admiral Grant Sharp shortly after speaking with Johnson, it was not to order a full investigation or to seek more detailed information. In fact, McNamara didn't even bring up the Herrick report. Instead, he seemed determined to obtain a statement from Sharp that would make it unnecessary to wait for further investigation. "There isn't any possibility there was no attack, is there?" asked McNamara.

Sharp insisted, however, that the commander on the scene was saying "the situation's in doubt" and suggested that McNamara "hold this execute" – meaning the strike order to CINCPAC and Seventh Fleet — "until we have a definite indication that this happened…." Sharp said he believed he could get a "definite indication" that the event had occurred within two hours.

But McNamara rejected Sharp's proposal to wait for confirmation of the attack. Instead he said, "[I]t seems to me we ought to go ahead on that basis: get the pilots briefed, get the planes armed, get everything lined up to go. Continue the execute order in effect, but between now and 6 o'clock get a definite fix and you call me directly."

McNamara didn't claim that he had authority from Johnson to make that decision.

After the conversation with Sharp, McNamara didn't call LBJ to report on what Sharp had told him or what they had agreed on, according to White House phone logs. Instead he went ahead on his own to issue the execute order at 4:49 pm.

The next phone call, which came just one minute after that order was sent, did not come from McNamara but from LBJ. That brief phone conversation, which was not recorded, was followed moments later by a call from McNamara to Johnson in which he the Secretary said the story had already been broken by wire services that a meeting at the White House that night would brief congressional leaders about a second attack on U.S. warships.

McNamara urged Johnson to authorize a statement by the Pentagon about the attack. He'd somehow found the time during the previous hour to draft a statement reaffirming the attack, which he read to Johnson. It said two U.S. warships had been attacked by patrol boats, but that the North Vietnamese boats had been "driven off." It concluded, "We believe several of the patrol boats were sunk. Details won't be available till daylight."

Neither McNamara nor Johnson alluded in that conversation to Admiral Sharp's seeking confirmatory evidence – a matter that would surely have been on LBJ's mind if McNamara had told him about it.

The record of phone McNamara-Johnson conversations on the afternoon of Aug. 4, 1964 thus shows a President who was blissfully unaware that the original reports of an attack were now in doubt and that the Commander-in-Chief of Pacific forces was still seeking to obtain confirmation of the attack.

Ultimately, National Security Council documents declassified in 2005 (PDF) would reveal that no attack on US warships had taken place.

It "is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night," they said. "In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on August 2."

Reporter confronted McNamara in 2004

This writer confronted McNamara with that record in a phone conversation with him on Feb. 24, 2004. His response was that telephone calls were not the only way he had to communicate with Johnson and that he could have told Johnson about the military's unresolved doubts at the National Security Council meeting which took place that night at 6:15 pm.

Unfortunately for McNamara's alibi, detailed official notes of that Council meeting taken by NSC staffer Bromley Smith, marked "Top Secret Sensitive, For the President's Eyes Only," show that McNamara again asserted unequivocally that the attack had indeed taken place.

After USIA Director Carl Rowan asked, "Do we know for a fact that the North Vietnamese provocation took place?" McNamara said, "We will know definitely in the morning."

When I read those quotes to McNamara over the phone, he suggested that the notes were "not complete." But McNamara was admitting, in effect, that he did not inform LBJ that afternoon about the Herrick report or about Sharp's plea to hold off the execute order until confirming evidence had been obtained.

The records of the Tonkin Gulf crisis in the LBJ library also include documentation showing LBJ wanted to get the truth about what McNamara knew and when he knew it.

Even before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was approved by the Senate Aug. 7, LBJ ordered a full account of the communications between the commanders of U.S. Pacific forces and the Pentagon on Aug. 4 and 5. The requested study was referred to as the "inquiry," according to a handwritten note on a draft chronology prepared at the Pentagon. It was to be based on the original tapes of all such communications, which were tracked down and transcribed.

McNamara altered transcripts of calls

The clearest evidence that McNamara was afraid of what the inquiry would reveal about his maneuvering on Aug. 4 is that the chronology produced under his personal guidance — where numerous changes were made on previous drafts in McNamara's own handwriting — deliberately suppressed the most damning words from the transcript of his conversation with Sharp.

Not only did the official Defense Department chronology change the wording of McNamara's question to Sharp so that it was no longer obviously a leading question, it also failed to mention Sharp's revelation that Herrick considered the "whole situation" to be "in doubt" and was calling for "daylight recce" — or reconnaissance.

In addition, the McNamara's chronology portrayed him as agreeing with Sharp that the execute order should be delayed until definite evidence of an attack was obtained. It reports, "McNamara says that even if definite confirmation of an attack is not forthcoming for another 2 hours, an hour would still remain and the execute order could then be issued."

But McNamara had not said that the executive order could be issued after getting confirmation of an attack. He had said the opposite: "Continue the execute order in effect, but between now and 6 o'clock get a definite fix and you call me directly." So that crucial sentence was omitted from the chronology.

McNamara did not want LBJ to know that he had rejected Sharp's proposal to hold the execute order until the situation was clarified and had not even informed him.

There is more evidence in the presidential tapes at the LBJ Library that Johnson believed that McNamara had misinformed him about what had happened in the Tonkin Gulf. Six weeks later, McNamara and then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk went to Johnson with yet another claim that North Vietnamese boats had attacked a U.S. warship in the Tonkin Gulf and again urged a retaliatory bombing of the North.

This time Johnson expressed skepticism and complained about McNamara's claim of an attack on Aug. 4. "You just came in a few weeks ago and said they're launching an attack on us – they're firing at us," Johnson tells McNamara on the tape recording of the conversation, "and we got through with the firing and concluded maybe they hadn't fired at all."

Whether or not Johnson understood the seriousness of McNamara's deception Aug. 4, he seemed to become even more resistant to McNamara's views on Vietnam after the incident. That fall, during the presidential election campaign, Johnson began to challenge McNamara for his advocacy of bombing North Vietnam, even referring to his proposal as "your bombing bullshit," according to accounts given by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton to Daniel Ellsberg, his then-assistant (who later leaked what would be known as the Pentagon papers).

McNamara's deception was one of many maneuvers aimed at pulling Johnson into an escalated war in Vietnam. But it is perhaps the only one in which McNamara's role shifted from tough bureaucratic in-fighting to usurping presidential authority, in effect, on an issue involving the use of military force.

On the following audio file from The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Johnson can be heard telling McNamara that he had misinformed him about the alleged attack:

http://216.87.173.33/media/2009/0907/porter_johnson_mcnamara_090708a.mp3

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Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian who covered the Vietnam War as Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service International in 1970-71 and taught international studies at the City College of New York and American University from 1982 to 1990. His book Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, documents US policymaking on Vietnam during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He has a doctorate in Southeast Asian politics from Cornell University, and currently covers diplomatic and military affairs for Inter Press Service.