Scientists warn of 3D printing health effects as tech hits high street

A group of scientists have warned that 3D printers can harm humans if they’re not set up in the right environment, just a week after the first 3D printer was introduced to the high street.

The relatively new printing method has received a lot of press attention, with a wide variety of publications covering all the latest things made by 3D printers, from bathroom plugs to plastic figurines that can be made to look like anyone.

However, academics in America and France have released a paper warning that the significant number of particles emitted as a result of 3D printing can be hazardous to humans when they are inhaled.

The team of scientists from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and France’s National Institute of Applied Sciences found that thermal extrusion and deposition of plastics by a commonly available 3D printer emitted a large amount of very small particles, mostly less than 100 nanometres in diameter.

When ultrafine particles (UFPs) are inhaled they can end up in the lungs and even the brain.

“These small particles can cause inflammation in our respiratory system, or penetrate deep into our lungs and are small enough to enter our bloodstream,” lead author from IIT, Brent Stephens, told Techworld.

“Once in our bloodstream, they may interact with our cells, or may be deposited in sensitive areas such as bone marrow, lymph nodes, spleen, or heart. They can also access the central nervous system via our brains.”

According to the authors, a number of recent epidemiological studies have shown that elevated UFP concentrations are linked to adverse health effects, including cardio-respiratory mortality, hospital admissions for stroke, and asthma symptoms.

The team tested two different 3D printing materials (ABS and PLA) to see how many UFPs each one emitted when set to work on by a 3D printer.

They found that ABS emits 10 times as many ultra-fine particles (UFPs) than PLA.

The £700 Velleman K8200, which went on sale to high street customers through Maplin earlier this month, prints both ABS and PLA.

Velleman refused to respond to the scientific study because the exact 3D printer used in the experiments was not disclosed. However, the company did send Techworld a copy of the safety instructions that are distributed with its K8200 printer.

“PLA is a safe and non-toxic material, there are no known health safety risks when used in 3D printers,” the instructions read.

They continue: “When printing with ABS there is a distinctive “burned plastic" smell. This is quite normal but it may also cause headaches, respiratory- and eye irritation with sensitive people (although it is not toxic).”

Stephens told Techworld that ABS fumes have been shown to be toxic to rats and mice in a few studies. “There is a good chance that ABS-fed 3D printers may be more harmful than PLA-fed printers due to both higher emissions and likely higher toxicity,” he said.

The instructions go on to point out that the printer should only be used in a well-ventilated area and “advise” a fume hood is used when printing with ABS. They also say that fume extraction is mandatory for use in offices, classrooms and alike.

“The easiest way for most users to continue using their same printers is to operate them under a fume hood or exhaust ventilation system, similar to a commercial kitchen environment or a lab environment,” said Stephens. “I'm not aware of any filtration add-ons that have been devised yet to control emissions, but I think it's worth exploring as another solution.”

How to monitor and improve the health of your datacentre

Your system administrators are looking at their screens, and all seems well. A sea of green denotes that every monitored system is performing optimally, and the system administrators’ thoughts are turning to the weekend and a 48-hour splurge of online gaming or code debugging.

On the helpdesk meanwhile, the screams of anguished users can be heard, bemoaning the fact that their productivity has plummeted – due to poor access to or poor performance of the IT platform.

Somehow, there has been a serious disconnect between the system administrators’ metrics and the users’ experience. From the IT department’s point of view, everything is running well – but are they looking at the wrong things, or perhaps not looking at enough of the right things? For the user, identifying blame is easy: it’s IT’s fault – but that is usually a gross, and often unjust, simplification.

Just how “healthy” is your datacentre? Is it doing what the business requires of it, or is it part of the problem? To answer this key question, datacentre managers must first identify what it is, exactly, that they need to measure.

To check the datacentre’s health and to minimise downtime, there is a need for multiple levels of measurement – from the highly granular, equipment-based monitoring and reporting, to the outside-in monitoring and reporting from the user’s viewpoint.

At the datacentre IT equipment level, monitoring its state and performance is no longer enough. Being reactive to problems is storing up issues – an “N+1” redundancy approach (having one more item of equipment than is truly needed) turns into an “N” approach if an item fails – and if a second one then fails while the first is being fixed, IT disaster strikes.

It is far more strategic to use a predictive approach – monitoring factors such as the temperature of key components such as the central processing units (CPUs) and disk drives; monitoring the power draw to see if this suddenly and unexpectedly alters or is trending upwards, and replace the system before it fails.

Datacentre managers should also understand that during a replacement, an N+1 approach is no longer providing any redundancy – so they should either go for an N+2 (or greater) approach, or ensure that the key component are easily accessible so that replacement can be carried out rapidly. This will help to minimise the time where redundancy is not in place.

Next is the environmental health of the datacentre. The use of monitoring tools for overall temperature, smoke and humidity, along with infrared heat sensors, will allow problems to be detected before they become issues. By linking these to the equipment monitoring systems, IT will be able to connect the presence of a datacentre hot spot (indicated by an infrared sensor) with a specific piece of equipment which can be swapped out or shut down to prevent the problem getting out of hand.

The broader facility and its equipment also need to be monitored and assessed to maintain a datacentre in good health. Whereas facilities management may be using a building information modelling (BIM) tool, this will generally not be integrated into IT’s systems management tools.

The use of a datacentre infrastructure management (DCIM) suite may pull everything together, but that alone will not suffice. In addition to implementing DCIM tools, the health of the facility’s power distribution, uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs), auxiliary generators and cooling systems have to be linked in to the overall view of how the datacentre is performing.

Through using modular systems throughout a datacentre infrastructure – from the IT equipment to the facility support equipment, failures of individual pieces of equipment can be allowed for.

Where possible, datacentre teams should use load balancing capabilities – for example, using intelligent virtualisation of servers, storage and networking equipment and intelligent workload management modes in UPSs and generators – to provide the maximum levels of business continuity.

Load balancing will provide much higher levels of availability than a direct, simple N+1 approach, as the failure of even two or more items can still be dealt with, even if the application performance is affected.

But assessing the datacentre infrastructure’s health is not just an IT question, it is a business question.

The above discussions deal with the datacentre itself – and for many organisations that may already have the above in place, it may be seen as being enough.

The problem is that the screens that the systems’ administrators are looking at are generally part of that datacentre environment, and are connected to the systems through datacentre networks at datacentre speeds. So it is hardly surprising that everything looks as if it is working well while the helpdesk goes into meltdown.

The datacentre is generally connected to the rest of the organisation through local and wide area networks (LANs and WANs). Users access the datacentre through these networks. If there are problems anywhere along these connections, the user will have a poor experience – and will contact the helpdesk, often with the perception that it is an application or a datacentre problem, rather than a network one.

It is incumbent on the datacentre manager, therefore, to be able to monitor connectivity across the different types of network to ensure that the datacentre serves the business users’ IT needs.

Any datacentre manager looking to fully support the business should take an end-to-end systems management approach, so ensuring that the organisation is working against a healthy IT platform – not just a healthy datacentre

Another challenge is that many of today’s workers are mobile and/or working remotely and will therefore be accessing the company’s datacentre services through public connectivity – ADSL lines or Wi-Fi or mobile wireless networks. Being able to measure network performance across these less predictable connections can be problematic – but providing tools to the helpdesk for them to “ping” the user’s device and see if latency, jitter or packet loss are causing issues will help the IT in effectively identifying the root cause of any issue.

The final area is around the user’s device itself. A PC may have a disk drive that is full, a tablet may have a process that has hung at 100% CPU utilisation, or a virus may be affecting overall performance. Putting in place tools that enable the endpoint device to be monitored and fixed – automatically wherever possible, or through efficient and effective means via the helpdesk where automation cannot be used – will again make root cause analysis easier.

The use of human mean opinion scoring (MOS) systems can also help. Rather than depend on technical measurement of the performance of systems where comparing a pseudo-transaction’s performance against an old service level agreement (SLA) and getting a green signal, asking real users as to their experience will be far more illuminating.

If users find performance to be too slow, it is no use pointing to the SLA and saying that it is within agreed limits – if the perception is that it is too slow, then it is down to IT to see if performance can be improved.

Monitoring the health of the datacentre is like monitoring the health of a person: focusing on just one area can mean missing where the real issue is and thereby lead to the failure to properly treat the problem.

Determining the set of measurements that will provide an accurate assessment of datacentre health in terms of business performance requires a holistic approach.

Any datacentre manager looking to fully support the business should take an end-to-end systems management approach, so ensuring that the organisation is working against a healthy IT platform – not just a healthy datacentre.

Clive Longbottom is service director at analyst Quocirca. The datacentre consultancy firm has three papers that cover ITLM and IT financing available for free download here: Using ICT financing for strategic gain; Don’t sweat assets, liberate them; and De-risking IT lifecycle management.

Bits Blog: Health Sites Under Scrutiny Over Mining of Data

Millions of people rely on Web sites like WebMD and Health.com for information about depression, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer and other sensitive personal health issues. But it can be difficult for consumers to understand how health sites may capture, analyze and share information about user searches and other activities — even the small minority of people who manage to slog all the way through the privacy policies.

Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois.
In an effort to increase industry transparency, Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, has opened an inquiry into the data-mining practices of some popular health sites.

On Tuesday, she sent letters to officials at eight sites asking for detailed information about their companies’ data collection, data storage and data sharing practices. The sites included: about.com; drugs.com; health.com; mayoclinic.com; menshealth.com; mercola.com; WebMd.com; and weightwatchers.com.

In the letters to the sites’ executives, Ms. Madigan said she was concerned about the potential dissemination of information related to people’s private health concerns.

“Health-related information, which would be protected from disclosure when said in a doctor’s office, can be captured, shared, and sold when entered into a Web site,” she wrote. “These concerns are likely overlooked by consumers, as the disclosures about capturing and sharing their information are often buried in privacy policies not found on websites’ main pages.”

WebMD’s privacy policy, for example, says that the site does not make a user’s personal information – like a name or address — available to third parties for marketing purposes.

But third parties, the privacy policy says, may use non-personal data to target WebMD users with ads related to their interests. The policy added that WebMD may combine personal and nonpersonal information about users on the site, or may collate that data with information gathered from external sources.

Risa Fisher, a spokeswoman for WebMD, said that the company had just received Ms. Madigan’s letter of inquiry and planned to provide the information she requested about its user data practices.

“Privacy is very important to WebMD and our policies are designed to fully protect the personal health information of our users,” Ms. Fisher said.

The Illinois inquiry comes after the publication a few days ago of a research letter in a medical journal reporting that some popular health portals leaked information about users’ health searches to third parties, like social networks or ad networks, operating on their Web sites.

For his research, Marco D. Huesch, a health care policy researcher at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at University of Southern California searched for content related to depression, herpes and cancer on 20 popular health-related Web sites.

In the letter about his study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, he said that 13 of those sites used third-party tracking elements like cookies or social media plug-ins. Seven of the sites, he wrote, leaked his health searches to third-party trackers.

Although Mr. Huesch wrote that he could not determine whether the third parties misused the information, he found the leakage of the health searches worrisome in itself.

“The ramifications could span embarrassment, discrimination in the labor market,” Mr. Huesch wrote, “or the deliberate decision by marketers not to offer or advertise particular goods and services to an individual, based solely on the companies’ privately gathered knowledge.”

The online advertising industry is keenly aware of such concerns.

This year, the Network Advertising Initiative, an industry self-regulatory association for third-party digital ad companies, revised its code of conduct to require that its members obtain user permission before collecting information about certain specific health conditions.

The conditions that would require user permission include “all types of cancer, mental health related conditions, and sexually transmitted diseases,” the revised code said, but not acne, high blood pressure, heartburn, cold and flu, or cholesterol management.

The self-regulatory group has nearly 100 members, according to its site. The updated version of code of conduct is scheduled to take effect next year.

Tax Break Can Help With Health Coverage, But There's A Catch

Tax credits may help make health insurance more affordable, but can bite back if your income goes up more than expected.

There are two kinds of financial help for people planning to enroll in the online health insurance marketplaces that will open this fall. One could put people at risk of having to pay some of the money back, while the other won't.

That's one big difference between tax credits and subsidies, both of which are intended to help people with lower incomes pay for health insurance through the new health care law.

People with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($11,490 to $45,960 for individuals in 2013) may be eligible for tax credits to reduce the cost of their monthly health insurance premiums.

In addition, people with incomes between 100 and 250 percent of the poverty level ($11,490 to $28,725) may qualify for cost-sharing subsidies that will bring down their deductibles, copayments and coinsurance. The subsidies also reduce the maximum amount they can be required to pay out of pocket annually for medical care.

Instead of waiting until tax time to claim the credit for the premiums on their return, people can apply to get it in advance, based on their estimated income for 2014. In that case, the state health exchange, or marketplace, will estimate the tax credit and send it directly to the insurer.

But there's a catch. When April 15 rolls around, the Internal Revenue Service will reconcile the amount of the advance payments sent to the insurer with the taxpayer's actual income. If a person's income is higher than the estimate, the taxpayer will have to repay the difference.

But there's some good news, too. If a person's income is lower than estimated, the taxpayer will get a credit.

People who quality for the cost-sharing subsidies won't face the same financial risk. The federal subsidies, which reduce consumers' out-of-pocket costs, will be paid directly to insurers. They could cover thousands of dollars of costs, depending on a person's health care usage.

But with the subsidies, if a person's income changes during the year, he or she won't be responsible for any extra costs.

"It's not a reconcilable tax credit, so consumers aren't on the hook if their income changes," says Christine Monahan, a senior health policy analyst at Georgetown Health Policy Institute's Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

So check out both options for cheaper premiums, but be well aware of the differences.