GM-free Scotland

News | February '10 | Warning on nanoparticles

Apart from being man-made materials which couldn't ever arise naturally, nano-particles and transgenes share some important, and worrying features. One, getting real information about them is like pulling teeth. Two, there's no public record of exactly what they are, where they are or what they do. Three, no appropriate safety tests have been developed. And, four, they'll become an irremovable feature of your body.

At the beginning of 2010, a House of Lords Committee sounded a very serious health warning. Its concern was the emerging use of nanotechnology in foods, cosmetics and packaging, all of which will end up inside us.

Nanaparticles are man-made micro-complexes of materials. There's no definition, except that at least one dimension of the particle usually measures less than 100 nanometers (1 nanometer is 1/1000 of a millimeter). Also, an essential property is that they don't aggregate, or they wouldn't be nanoparticles any more. Nanoparticles, therefore, have an unnaturally independent quality which gives them unusual properties totally different from the macro-materials they are modelled on.

Their small size is the basis of their usefulness to man, but also the source of their danger. The combination of small size and artificial nature enables nanoparticles to penetrate living tissues with ease, and makes them unrecognisable to the immune system.

Although nanoparticles are difficult to detect and persist inside cells, their disruptive effects could be very far-reaching.

The Lords Committee is urging the government and research coucnils to act now to “fill in the significant gaps in our knowledge about how nanomaterials behave in the human body and to ensure that there are no safety concerns in this rapidly developing area”.

The Committee stressed the need for the Food Standards Agency to keep a public register of all food and packaging containing nanoparticles. It also warned that the evident secrecy surrounding the research and use of nanoparticles “may bring about the public reaction it is trying to avert”.

OUR COMMENT

Such unnatural materials cannot be examined using our older, routine toxicological tests. The gaps in knowledge on the implications of such particles to health will only be filled by long-term testing using techniques which examine the fine structure and function of cells. When a few such tests were belatedly applied to GM foods, indications that the cells of vital organs such as the liver, were under stress have, indeed, emerged.

Geneticists have confirmed that any kind of stress (emotional, physical, infection, inflammation etc.) can trigger cancer-promoting genes, even in distant tissues. How much greater will our susceptibility to cancer or other chronic diseases become if our vital organs are being stressed by a GM diet, by nano-articles, or both together?

The most interesting thing about the Lords' report is that it makes clear that the lessons of GM are in their awareness: a novel material was slipped into the diet without appropriate safety testing, without labelling and without any record of where it came from or where it ended up.

If the House of Lords warning on nanoparticles is heeded and tests for cellular disturbance are developed, be ready to require such tests be applied to GM foods for all the same reasons they are needed for nanoparticles.

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