Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
occurs. In that case oxidized elements can exert their toxic effects. So, the concept
of Toxicology needs to be extended, new tests must be devised and a new expres-
sion must be invented to describe specific behaviors over time.
Conclusions
To sum up what we have tried to clarify in this chapter, Nanopathology is a
key to help diagnose old and new diseases. Considering the organism a
collection of organs with just faint and hazy mutual relationships is proving
a more and more unsatisfactory approach to Medicine, particularly when
so-far unknown or little-known pathologies are concerned. This is even
more true when syndromes that bring together diseases that apparently have
nothing to do with each other is the case.
There is nothing new in saying that the organism works as a harmony
among cells, tissues and organs and that each component interacts more or
less strictly with the rest of the body. The obvious consequence is that
anything troubling that harmony can disturb its equilibrium with effects that
may be not immediately understandable or not understandable at all if the
sectional view of physiology and pathology is the one adopted. The concept
can easily be amplified observing that the organism pursues its metabolism
immersed in an environment by which is obviously influenced.
Nanopathology deals with the often complex interactions between the
organism and what surrounds it. More in particular, what enters the organism:
air, food, and drugs. As already mentioned above, besides the detection and
the analysis of the particulate pollutants in the patient
s samples, applying
Nanopathologies demands the search of the origin of the exposure the subject
underwent; of how the pollutants entered; of how they moved throughout the
organism; of the symptoms they induced. All that, as a first step, aimed at
eliminating the pollutants from the patient
'
s life. The further steps are nec-
essarily those of finding proper therapies and techniques to get rid of them
from the tissues. For the time being, prevention is the most powerful—the
only, in truth—weapon we have available [
18
,
19
].
If we want to be effective, the first thing to do is recognize the problem and
define its components. Then we must realize that this is a new kind of
Medicine that requires necessarily a multidisciplinary approach. Medical
doctors expert in particular fields (oncologists, endocrinologists, hematolo-
gists, gynecologists, toxicologists, etc.) must work together with materialists,
chemists, physicists and biologists. But, given the complexity of the subject,
engineers, agronomists, pharmacists, and many other specialists could be
necessary to understand particular cases.
'
Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Dr. Federico Capitani and Ms. Lavinia Nitu for
their valuable help in the analytical work.
