Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Health & Safety”
The lead poisoning scandal in Flint, Michigan, highlighted that access to safe drinking water is not just an issue in the developing world. And as Reuters reports, “while poverty remains a potent predictor of lead poisoning, the victims span the American spectrum – poor and rich, rural and urban, black and white. An examination of lead testing results across the …
The World Economic Forum publishes its Global Risks Report 2013 today, and my opinion is buried in there somewhere among the other thousand experts. It’s always a fascinating document, although it is a survey of opinion, hence nanotechnology being defined as a high likelihood high impact risk eight years ago! That said, the first paragraph of the report flags carbon nanotubes …
Every few years there is a call for nano materials and food to be labeled and the rationale is that in the case of GMO’s it allowed consumers to make an informed choice. An article GM a “cautionary tale” for nanotechnology caught my eye: However, the author states:“The GM food rejection in OECD countries provides an illustration of what needs to …
Much of the past decade has been spent worrying about the potential toxicity of nanomaterials. We have had numerous government-funded projects, scores of publications by environmental groups, intense lobbying demanding the labelling of nanomaterials, and even a law suit. But while the developed world agonises over the use of nanomaterials, much of the rest of the world is simply getting …
There has been plenty of discussion from all quarters about how the UK failed to grasp the significance of nanotechnology, and instead spent years fretting over heath and safety implications. Without any real nanotechnology related activity in UK industry, worrying about the potential downside is like spending all your time planning what you will do if you win the lottery. …
Iran has always been a source of fascination, a place of ancient culture and history and now a country making a lot of noise about science and technology, so I was pleased to be invited by the Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council to attend the Iran Nano 2011 exhibition in Tehran. As I’d spent the previous few days in Taiwan at …
Is inorganic biology responsible or irresponsible innovation? It is way too early to answer that question, and we shouldn’t even try until we know what it will be used for. It may even be a scientific dead end, and much of the debate about ethics, safety and regulation will end up as productive as the debate about ‘gray goo.’
The White House Emerging Technologies Interagency Policy Coordination Committee (ETIPC) has developed a set of principles (pdf) specific to the regulation and oversight of applications of nanotechnology, to guide the development and implementation of policies at the agency level. I’m glad to see that it addresses those two old bugbears, the confusion between risk and hazard and the prejudging of issues …
I’ll leave the professional report readers such as 2020Science to wade through the Friends of the Earth’s latest broadside against nanotechnology which claims that it “isn’t green enough.” This brief report in “The Australian” neatly sums up the argument, which is that although nanotechnology has been spoken of as a solution to some aspects of climate change, it is is …
Reading reports of government plans for the regulation of nanotechnology sometimes feels like being on death row. The outcome is inevitable, and all you can do is hope that it will be short and painless. The European Commission has been debating regulations for the best part of a decade,and now apparently has been given a deadline of 2011 by the …