Journal
ENVIRONMENT INTERNATIONAL
Volume 99, Issue -, Pages 199-207Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2016.11.017
Keywords
Silver nanoparticles; Human health risk assessment; Engineered nanomaterials; Stochastic risk assessment
Categories
Funding
- European Commission in the frame of the FP7 project SUN [604305]
- European Commission Horizon Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships NanoERA [66096]
- European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Modeling Nanomaterial Toxicity (MODENA) Initiative
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Silver nanoparticles (n-Ag) are widely used in consumer products and many medical applications because of their unique antibacterial properties. Their use is raising concern about potential human exposures and health effects. Therefore, it is informative to assess the potential human health risks of n-Ag in order to ensure that nano technology-based consumer products are deployed in a safe and sustainable way. Even though toxicity studies clearly show the potential hazard of n-Ag, there have been few attempts to integrate hazard and exposure assessments to evaluate risks. The underlying reason for this is the difficulty in characterizing exposure and the lack of toxicity studies essential for human health risk assessment (HHRA). Such data gaps introduce significant uncertainty into the risk assessment process. This study uses probabilistic methods to assess the relative uncertainty and potential risks of n-Ag exposure to infants. In this paper, we estimate the risks for infants potentially exposed to n-Ag through drinking juice or milk from sippy cups or licking baby blankets containing n-Ag. We explicitly evaluate uncertainty and variability contained in available dose-response and exposure data in order to make the risk characterization process transparent. Our results showed that individual margin of exposures for oral exposure to sippy cups and baby blankets containing n-Ag exhibited minimal risk. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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