NANOPARTICLES AND OUR HEALTH

The air we breathe may contain a variety of truly harmful pollutants, including
NOx gases, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, volatile organic compounds
(VOC’s) and PM2.5’s.

BUT……
It has now been shown that 90% of all particles which are polluting the air beside a busy road, are
nanoparticles and they arrive in our bodies, through the lungs, thousands at a time.

Current pollution meters don’t count the very smallest pollutants – nanoparticles. Recent
research suggests these tiny toxic substances could be a MAJOR cause of illness and death.

Most countries including the US and the EU have legal limits for the most harmful air pollutants,
including PM2.5, NOx, carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide. But no similar regulatory limits exist
for nanoparticles.

What are nano-particles?

These are tiny

particles, mostly
much less than
100nm in diameter.
PM2.5’s are
considerably bigger –
2.5 micrometres
(2,500nm).

This is a problem for our health - the smaller particles you have, the greater their surface area. A
greater surface area means more toxicity, as they are in touch with a greater surface area inside your
body. To visualise this, imagine footballs versus golf balls. A football has a circumference of 70cm
and a surface area of around 1,500 cm2. A golf ball is obviously much smaller, with a
circumference of about 13cm, making its surface area 54cm2. By volume, you could fit156 golf
balls into the same space as a football, but the total surface area of all those golf balls would be
8,453cm2 – a substantial 6.9 square metres more than the football. On a nano-scale, that difference
is amplified. A cloud of billion10nm particles has the same mass as just one PM10 particle, but a
combined surface area a million times larger.

And that surface area comes coated with toxic, unburnt fuel from vehicle exhausts.

Nanoparticles can also easily pass through the walls of the lungs and into the bloodstream, in a way
that larger PM2.5s cannot. Once in the bloodstream they cause the same inflammation damage they
inflict on the lungs, except now they can reach any organ or artery in the body. Nanoparticles also
pass through the placenta and can reach an unborn foetus.

For years, doctors and scientists have known about a clear relationship between levels of air
pollution and heart disease, but they have never been able to understand the exact cause. It seems
that nanoparticle pollution may well be what they should be looking at.

This text is adapted by John Osborne, from a report carried by the BBC on 15th November 2019.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191113-the-toxic-killers-in-our-air-too-small-to-see