Saturday, 4 August 2007
Particles
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There's an interesting new health/safety issue that's surfaced. As covered in many places, it turns out that many office printers emit very small toner particles that some allege are a health risk, and printer makers defend as harmless. So is this a case of the big nasty Corporations trying to play dumb about the serious health side affects of its product or is it sensationalist media outlets and plaintiffs lawyers trying to create hysteria and get rich? Or both? or neither? or some shade of gray? It's impossible to know up front, but I guarantee you that the plaintiffs lawyers will be massing to take a bite out of HP and other printer makers, who will defend themselves vigorously.
I'm surprising that this is new, actually. Somebody out there who works in a clean room must have asked about printer emissions. I recall that when I worked at Applied Materials, some types of printer were approved for use in the clean room. I also recall that smokers have particles all over their clothes that come off -- 3rd hand smoke, if you will.
I don't see any reason to assume without evidence that printer particles are any worse than anything other kinds of inert particles. Paper itself releases white particulates that are left over from the cutting process. Cells in your body, and especially in the lungs, have pretty reasonable defenses called macrophages against ordinary particles and other "debris". You'd have to go through something comparable to what a coal miner does over years of exposure to have problems.
All particles are not created equal, of course. Asbestos is a notable example at the other extreme. The problem is that with large jury verdicts on the line over the outcome, the science inevitably becomes politicized, and appeals to emotions are exploited on both sides. The burden of scientific proof has to lie on whoever is trying to make the claim. Also, even if you prove the claim, you should have to prove the fix is better than the disease. DDT has undoubtably harmed the health of hundreds or perhaps thousands of people, yet it was also a powerful weapon in combating mosquito borne malaria, which has killed 10's of millions of people. It's isn't clear that from a strict utilitarian viewpoint that we are safer without it. There are many ironies here: some people claim that had asbestos not been banned, then the world trade towers, which used it up to the 40th floor, might have stood a little longer. 10 minutes might have saved several hundred more lives.
There's a problem with the human psyche that we are predisposed to take the side of the person at risk in front of us. Even greater nonsense has been levied in the name of safety for the anonymous masses. I'm surprised we haven't actually started bubble-wrapping children. When I was a little kid, there was a big push to wear seatbelts. Now it isn't enough to have kids ride in a car-seat, it has to be installed in the proper location within the car (away from those dangerous air-bags) and in the proper direction (facing backwards until 1 year and 24 pounds). Am I opposed to car seats? No, I use them every time. I just don't see how we ever as a society decide not to take the next step in the long chain that eventually leads to bubble-wrapping our kids 24/7. Hopefully this journey will take long enough that I'll die in the meantime from one of the officially safe ways to die.
We also have extreme difficulty understanding what is required to prove causality". and we often confuse it with correlation. Everybody together now: "correlation is not causality". Dow Corning found that out in their silicon breast implant litigation which caused the company to fold under the weight of large verdicts that were sustained on appeal. How do we get a legal system that's capable of defeating this tactic by plaintiffs lawyers. To prove that A causes B, find all the people that have A and B and litigate. Something like 1% of women have lupus. Something like 1% had silicon breast implants. So out of 100 million women of the appropriate age, you'd expect about 10 thousand to have both. The plaintiffs lawyers found a couple hundred of those women and destroyed a company that had marketed a product with proveable safety problem. The accepted scientific opinion now is that there is no clear evidence of a causal link between silicone breast implants and systemic disease.
What do we really know about printers and particles? Not much. I know that I no longer get the newspaper (which would tell me about bridges collapsing during ordinary use), partly because I find the ink occasionally discolors my hands, but mostly because it's a pain to have to continually throw them out. I do feel a little guilty as now the volume of stuff I recycle is lower. :-] My advice to you: don't print this blog. Instead read it on the screen, where no one alleges there are any safety risks, or a least with all this distraction due to printer pollution, I've forgotten what they are. Absense of evidence is not evidence of absence. Absence of allegation, on the other hand, IS an allegation of absensce.
I better stop writing, my eyes kind of hurt. Either that's because I had lasik a month ago and my eyes have contracted one of the several complications that arise in 0.2% of treatments, or it's because video screens actually are more risky than printers, or maybe my eyes are just dry. I hope there are no particles in my eye drops.
Posted by at 11:37 AM in the internet, web, web 2.0 and beyond
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