Silent Invisible Killers

A few years ago I was scanning receipts into my computer. Touching them with my bare hands, a friend who was watching me pointed out that I should wear gloves when handling thermal paper. I had no idea why.

Turns out these receipts are often coated in Bisphenol A, or “BPA”, a hazardous environmental toxin. 

"Bisphenols are endocrine-disrupting chemicals that mimic hormones such as estrogen and thyroid hormone. Studies have shown that there is an association between elevated levels of BPA detected in human urine and a number of health problems, including increased risk of miscarriages and premature birth and prostate cancer." explains Nancy L. Wayne, PhD, professor at the UCLA School of Medicine's Department of Physiology.

I didn’t know that there's more BPA in a single thermal paper receipt than the total amount that would leach out from a polycarbonate water bottle used for many years.

Neither did I know that the skin absorption of BPA leads to prolonged exposure when compared to dietary absorption (meaning, your body continues absorbing the chemical long after you've thrown away the receipt).

But how do you know which materials or objects are covered with poisonous chemicals, harmful toxins, or, perhaps even unwanted nano-tech entering our bodies simply by touch?

Right now we don’t. Yet the technologies to detect the different components which are disturbing our biological systems are quite mature for many decades and could easily help us identify what’s safe to touch and where we’d better put our gloves on.

Using on-site spectroscopy in combination with real-time backend data analytics would enable us to constantly upgrade our knowledge of harmful toxic substances and enable us to analyze potential threats if, where, and when they come along.

That’s why I supported the Crowdfunding Campaign of Vispek’s Magic Pencil:

I got mine last week and am happy with the initial results, but the real power for my particular use case comes only once we’re able to start identifying BPA and other compounds e.g. by use of their developer license.

This a great opportunity for someone to get on top of this and share some visibility into an otherwise invisible world which is poisoning people unknowingly globally on a daily basis. Surely there would be a market for a product which told you by a simple few seconds scan: “safe to touch”.

If you’d like to learn more about BPA, read the Well+Good’s article and if you’re interested to figure out a way to use the Magic Pencil (or similar products) to identify the impact on our biological systems by touching certain materials, please email me, I’d love to collaborate or support such research.

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After publishing this post, I came across another interesting product — a “fruit and vegetable cleanliness detector”:

The principle is simple. Vegetables or fruit should be cleaned of dirt and placed in a bowl of water. After 2 to 3 minutes, the device is put there as well and will tell you how dirty the water is with pesticides and the color of the indicator will tell you whether you need to rinse the food to get rid of pesticide residue. If this one is already there, hopefully something for BPA and other toxins can be found soon.