Tag Archives: CSST

New US nanotechnology legislation for health and safety proposed; SAFENANO reviews 2009

After finding this announcement on Azonano (or you can find it on Senator Pryor’s site here),

U.S. Senators Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD) today introduced legislation to address potential health and safety risks about products that contain nanotechnology materials.

The Nanotechnology Safety Act of 2010 would establish a program within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to assess the health and safety implications of nanotechnology in everyday products and develop best practices for companies who employ nanotechnology. The legislation authorizes $25 million each year from 2011 through 2015.

I went looking for a comment or news release about it on the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies website and was surprised to find nothing. In fact, I couldn’t find any commentary anwyhere in my very brief search this morning.

Meanwhile, SAFENANO (an initiative of the UK’s Institute of Occupational Medicine) has produced a review of  nanotechnology environment, health, and safety developments for 2009. They cover both developments in Europe and elsewhere. From the review,

In January, the International Standards Organisation ISO published a technical report ISO/TR 12885:2008 ” Health and safety practices in occupational settings relevant to nanotechnologies “. The report provides a general background the nanoparticle risk issues and describes in some detail current practices for risk assessment, exposure measurement and control which are appropriate for use with engineered nanoparticles. This report takes an encyclopaedic view but stops short of recommending which practices are appropriate for which materials under which circumstances, leading to disappointment for some users. This report is commercially available from ISO.
This was closely followed by a report from Canada published by Institut de recherche Robert-Sauvé en santé et en sécurité du travail (IRSST), in collaboration with CSST and  NanoQuébec The document ” Best Practices Guide to Synthetic Nanoparticle Risk Management, Report R599 “, covered much of the same ground as the ISO document but in less detail. This document also introduced the idea of using a “control banding” approach based on that described by Paik and recommends that this approach is used where there is insufficient information for a quantitative risk assessment.

It is a very interesting and useful review which you can read here.