International Symposium on Nanotechnology, Occupational and Environmental Health

To help promote nanotechnology within both industry and government circles, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) cosponsored a number of gatherings, the most important being the International Symposium on Nanotechnology and Occupational Health. The first of these, the International Symposium on Occupational Health Implications of Nanomaterials, was held October 12–14, 2004, in the town of Buxton in the center of England.

The event was held at Buxton because the Health and Safety Laboratory of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the major research organization in Britain in connection with nanoscience, was located there, and served as the other cosponsor of the event. Some 130 world experts in the field of nanotechnology—covering medicine and medical research, industrial hygiene, chemical engineering, toxicology, and many related fields—attended the conference. John Ewins, the head of the science strategy and statistics division of HSE, said during the symposium opening that nanotechnology “could be the next industrial revolution across the world.” The final report from the conference was published in July 2005, and highlighted a number of problems and opportunities facing the field of nanotechnology. These include lack of studies that definitively answer whether nanomaterials have occupational health effects, the need for crossdisciplinary research to define the properties of nanoparticles and develop metrics to measure human exposure to them, and the need for international standardization of tools to measure, assess, and control exposure to nanoparticles.

[Page 363]The event was so successful that the NIOSH cosponsored a second International Symposium on Nanotechnology, Occupational and Environmental Health. This was held at Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 3–6, 2005, with additional help provided by the University of Minnesota, the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. This event attracted about 350 people, including government officials, industry leaders, and researchers from 20 countries.

The report that emerged highlighted that “research needs to continue to move from in-vitro to in-vivo studies,” and that “sound occupational exposure data are needed” as well as “precise, influential, and agreed upon exposure metrics need to be determined for toxicology and worker exposure: size, number, mass, surface area, behavior, and transport.”

Other recommendations included the need for agreement “to be obtained on the parameters of effective particle classification,” and standardized terminology needed “to be established and defined.” The report also recommended that “central communication sources, such as the NIOSH Web-dialogue on Safe Nanotechnology and the Nanoparticle Information Library, need to be fostered as mechanisms for researchers, industry, government, and the public to retrieve and share updated information.”

The third International Symposium on Nanotechnology, Occupational and Environmental Health was held from August 29 to September 1, 2007, in Taipei, Taiwan, coordinated through the Academica Sinica. It continued to address “the potential occupational and environmental impacts of nanotechnology,” and once again it brought together researchers from around the world. It included 149 presentations by researchers from 22 countries representing all regions of the world, except South American and Africa. Key concerns highlighted at this conference included the need for standardized methods of exposure assessment and calibration procedures to evaluation nanoparticle instrumentation, global collaboration to more rapidly disseminate knowledge gained from studies on humans (as opposed to animal and cellular studies), and the need for collaboration on surface characterization.

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