Nanotubes — the super-small, high-strength carbon fibers increasingly being deployed as static charge conductors in computers, strengtheners in composites for auto bodies, and electrical brushes — are potentially as dangerous as asbestos, a team of scientists warned Tuesday.
Injected into mice, nanotubes triggered the kind of cellular reaction that typically leads to the fatal cancer mesothelioma, the study, published online in the journal Nature, found. The scientists found that only longer strands of nanofibers have that effect and further research on the impact of inhaling nanotubes is called for, the scientists said.
The risk of inhaling nanotubes is so great that the government needs to aggressively do follow-up tests and issue guidance for factory workers, the scientists said. Indeed, nanotubes are likely a latter-day version of asbestos — a mineral with long, thin fibrous crystals that was widely used in industry and which causes mesothelioma. The cost of asbestos litigation is currently estimated at $250 billion.
“The problem of asbestos was caused when it was released into the air, if it was handled inappropriately or incorrectly,” said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies and one of the study’s authors. “Carbon nanotubes could do the same.”
In light of this study, “we should assume the worst,” Maynard said, until further research provides grounds to “relax that point of view.”
The good news is that we have a solid understanding of the dangers relatively early in the industrialization of nanotubes, said study contributor Anthony Seaton of the Institute of Occupational Medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland. “In a sense, we are forewarned and forearmed now with respect to nanotubes,” he said. “We know that some of them probably have the potential to cause mesothelioma. So those sorts of materials need to be handled very carefully.”
While scientists are warning that nanotube workers should…