Concerns Regarding Nanomaterials

An article regarding concerns abouts nanomaterials.

Another great seeding of fake news.

The study found in the laboratory that gold nanoparticles can bind to microalgae and can enter the food chain that depends on them.

It says little about toxicity except:

No toxicity due to the exposure to Au-NMs was observed in the algae, as tested by measuring the chlorophyll content relative to unexposed controls, consistent with a previous publication.

How relevant that is to what may happen outside the lab is hard to say. What might happen further up the food chain (to us for example) is not canvassed.

And yet we have the headline “The invisible killer lurking in our consumer products”

How many consumer products contain nanopartical gold? Who has been killed by such entering the food chain? About the only part of this that has any justification is that the particles are invisible.

The journalist also says:

Yet, nanomaterials and their use in consumer products can be problematic. A new study published in Nature Communications today sheds light on possible harms and what happens to them when they enter an organism.

Perhaps others can find where this is mentioned in the paper referenced, as far I can see the journalist has made it out of whole cloth.

I am not saying nanomaterials are harmless but this article contributes nothing towards consumer understanding of the situation.

May I suggest that Choice members do not pass on such alarmist material - especially without comment or qualification. The difficulty is that articles based on scientific papers get a false aura of authenticity but we find time and again that journalists grossly misrepresent such studies. This kind of article is one of the sources of “fake news” that we all decry. Let us not use this forum to spread such rumours.

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Why is this alarmist nonsense in the buyer beware alert category?
You can’t see it. It’s not in ingredients lists.
Hey, why not get all panicked about the trillions of microorganisms living in and on your body all the time?

The media has been very effective at creating hysteria about nanoparticles and nanotechnologies. Nanoparticles occur naturally in nature…