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When enough is enough

Nature Nanotechnology volume 7, pages 409–411 (2012)Cite this article

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In December 2011 the European Commission asked its Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) to provide a scientific opinion on nanosilver1. Specifically, this committee, which consists of independent scientists appointed by the Commission, is being asked to answer four questions under the general heading of 'Nanosilver: safety, health and environmental effects, and role in antimicrobial resistance'. However, most of these questions (and possibly all of them) have already been addressed by no less than 18 review articles in scientific journals, the oldest dating back to 20082,3,4, plus at least seven more reviews and reports commissioned and/or funded by governments and other organizations (Table 1). This raises an important question: when will governments and regulatory agencies stop asking for more reports and reviews, and start taking regulatory action?

Table 1 Many of the reviews on nanosilver that have been published since 2008 (first column) have already addressed the four questions on the environmental, health and safety (EHS) aspects of nanosilver that the SCENIHR was recently asked to review. Page numbers for the part(s) of each review that are relevant to these questions are listed in columns 2–5.
Full size table

In 2008, Sam Luoma (University of California, Davis) opened what now seems to be Pandora's silver box with his excellent overview of nanosilver and the environment3. In 2009, six reviews were published on this topic5,6,7,8,9,10, including reports commissioned by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in the UK6, the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BfR) in Germany7 and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) in the Netherlands8. One of the two vice-chairs of SCENIHR, Wim De Jong (RIVM), also co-authored a review article in the journal Nanotoxicology that is now one of the most cited papers in the field10.

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  1. Steffen Foss Hansen and Anders Baun are in the Department of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Lyngby, Denmark,

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Hansen, S., Baun, A. When enough is enough. Nature Nanotech 7, 409–411 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2012.115

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