There are a number of comments and articles currently floating around that push the importance of Nanotoxicity.\u00a0 First, I will raise my typical question.\u00a0 Why does anyone care about a billionth toxicity?\u00a0 To me, that sounds like something that is very safe.\u00a0 When the prefix, in this case \u201cnano\u201d, is attached to a word, it is a modifier and changes the value of what it is modifying.\u00a0 One can assume, but that is an assumption, that nanotoxicity actually is referring to nanomaterial toxicity or nanotechnology toxicity, but that requires making an assumption.<\/p>\n
Toxicity refers to degree that a substance, chemical, material, etc., can create damage to an organism.\u00a0 This impact can be on the entire organism or to a small subcomponent of it.\u00a0 A key concept is that the effects are dose-dependent.\u00a0 Everything can be dangerous when taken in too great a dose.\u00a0 However, the opposite is also true.\u00a0 There is a dose below which there is no observable effect.\u00a0 This is true for chemical, biological, and other material (physical) items.\u00a0 Consequently, toxicity addresses the effects based on predetermined doses.<\/p>\n
Safety refers to \u201cbeing safe.\u201d\u00a0 This implies that safety addresses situations where \u201cnon-safety\u201d or harm could results.\u00a0 It covers everything from personal safety (as in exposing one to dangerous situation where harm could occur) to providing a methodology for ensuring that any activity engaged in will not cause the individual (or environment) harm.\u00a0 An example is \u201cfire safety\u201d where guidelines are created to prevent the occurrence of unwanted fire situation to the methodology to address the removal of an unwanted fire occurrence.<\/p>\n
Nano-Safety or Nanotechnology Safety addresses the concept that considers the processes and procedures required to provide protection to people and the environment from possible applications that could involve a nanotechnology hazard.\u00a0 The primary issue is that whether something is or is not a hazard may not be known for a number of years.\u00a0 Consequently, the development of nano-safety education requires the development of methodologies that provide guidance in addressing situations where the material and its possible impact are unknown.\u00a0 This can be likened to training people to fight various types of fires.\u00a0 First one classifies the fire type, which then categorizes the possible methods to address the fire elimination.\u00a0 A similar methodology is being developed in the courses at Texas State University, which was mentioned in a previous blog.<\/p>\n
Nano-Toxicity is important to determine the potential issues with various nanomaterials and other nanothings. \u00a0The issue is that there is not sufficient time available to perform all the tests.\u00a0 Since material properties change in the lower double digit nanometer range, how does one determine that the situation being addressed contains 30 nm aluminum particles and not 45 nm ones?\u00a0 Since there can be many differences in the material size in a mixture, it is best to develop general procedures and apply them.\u00a0 Nano-Toxicity is not Nano-Safety, but only a small component that can be employed in developing the Nano-Safety effort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are a number of comments and articles currently floating around that push the importance of Nanotoxicity.\u00a0 First, I will raise my typical question.\u00a0 Why does anyone care [..]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nanotechnology-risk-management","category-nanotechnology-safety"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/98"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nano-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}