Over the course of many years, the International nano-Control Foundation (iNCF) used a detailed questionnaire to carefully and systematically collect information about health symptoms and exposure conditions of office employees who believed to be exposed to printers and photocopier machines in Germany. The data were collected between 1999 and 2010 from at least 2000 participants. After no one in Germany showed any interest on such data for many years, in 2021, a team of researchers from the US University of Massachusetts Lowell in the College of Health Sciences, led by Profs. Dhimiter Bello and Anila Bello, systematically analyzed the data and published the results in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine[1]. Dr. D Bello’s group has been investigating the chemistry and toxicology of nanoparticle emissions from printers and photocopiers for many years.
The current paper documented that workers who stated that they were exposed to particles from these machines, including copy and printer machine operators, technicians, and office workers, also reported high frequencies of respiratory diseases (90% of 1998 respondents), allergies (70% of respondents), as well as other health symptoms or diseases, including asthma/Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD, 15% of respondents), bronchial hyperreactivity, cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders, metal allergies (nickel and cobalt), gastrointestinal disorders, and some cancers. The researchers found that half of the workers reported that their acute respiratory and skin conditions improved significantly away from work (e.g. on the weekend or holidays) and worsened when returning to work, indicating an important role of workplace exposures on the reported symptoms. Weiterlesen
