title: Probabilistic approach for assessing infants' health risks due to ingestion of nanoscale silver released from consumer products.
abstract: 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 nanotechnology-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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy.
authors.forename: Chengfang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pang
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy; Green Decision Srl, Italy.
authors.forename: Danail
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hristozov
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy; Green Decision Srl, Italy.
authors.forename: Alex
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Zabeo
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy; Green Decision Srl, Italy.
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Pizzol
authors.affiliation: University of Bordeaux, ISM, UMR 5255, F-33400 Talence, France; CNRS, University of Bordeaux, ISM, UMR 5255, F-33400 Talence, France.
authors.forename: Michael P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Tsang
authors.affiliation: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, United States.
authors.forename: Phil
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sayre
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. Electronic address: marcom@unive.it.
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Marcomini
mesh_terms: D001512:Bedding and Linens; D003297:Cooking and Eating Utensils; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D053768:Metal Nanoparticles / Q000633:toxicity*; D018570:Risk Assessment; D012834:Silver / Q000633:toxicity*
chemical_list: D012834:Silver
keywords: Engineered nanomaterials; Human health risk assessment; Silver nanoparticles; Stochastic risk assessment