Why Trendy Nanosilver Products Are Hazardous to Your Health and the Environment | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/environment/why-trendy-nanosilver-products-are-hazardous-your-health-and-environment
Due to these developments, nanosilver has begun to appear in an increasing number of products. There are now over 400 products on the market that employ nanosilver technology, many of which involve direct contact with our bodies and our food, including clothing, sheets, blankets, cosmetics, soaps, nasal spray, hair straightener, ink, air purifiers, vegetable and fruit cleaners, cutting boards, vacuum cleaners and in Korea, even toothpaste.
Sounds too good to be true, right? It may be. Because the very thing that makes nanoparticles so effective—their size—is also what makes them a potential hazard. We still don’t fully know how nanosilver behaves when it’s released into the environment or absorbed by our bodies. A growing number of studies show that products containing nanosilver can shed these particles, which subsequently end up in wastewater or our bloodstream.
These rogue nanosilver particles pose a number of potential problems. As we’ve established, silver nanoparticles are highly toxic to bacteria and fungi. This is not good news for soil. Quoted in an article on Scientific American, Ben Colman, a research scientist at Duke University who conducted a study into the effects of nanosilver on soil systems, explained how these particles, “significantly altered [..] plant growth, microbial biomass and microbial activity.”
On the flipside, nanosilver toxicity poses a different threat to our own biology. The Center for Food Safety’s senior policy analyst Jaydee Hanson, quoted in an article on Civil Eats, noted that over time, overexposure to nanosilver, “may lead to bacteria becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics.” A study conducted by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health further found that silver nanoparticles had a “toxic effect on cells, suppressing cellular growth and multiplication and causing cell death depending on concentrations and duration of exposure.”
In 2014, the European Commission and its non-food Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks published findings under the comprehensive title, “Final Opinion on Nanosilver: safety, health and environmental effects and role in antimicrobial resistance.” SCENIHR found that in order to truly ascertain any potential hazards, more data was “needed to better understand bacterial response...to silver nanoparticles exposure.”