I’m not surprised — tattoo inks are not regulated and the colors are often formed with toxic compounds (e.g. copper). Then the needle avoids the protective barrier provided by the skin.
Ironically, while working on a drug program that involved intradermal injection, we needed to tattoo the injection site so we could find it later. The FDA was very demanding that both the procedure and more importantly to them the dye would not have any effect that might alter the body’s response to the compound under test. We had to do a whole study just to validate this.
So the FDA is concerned about this issue for guinea pigs, but is barred from investigating the effect on humans. All they can do is publish advice on their web site.
More importantly, just because tattoo ink is regulated doesn't mean discount tattoo parlors don't use cheap imports or old surplus that don't meet regulations. There are tattoo parlors that will tattoo intoxicated people (which you shouldn't do for a number of reasons ranging from consent to health risks and excessive bleeding) because they're their main source of income, there are likely many that use ink that isn't entirely above board.
As far as I can tell, the ink contains iron oxide which conducts and heats when the RF is applied.
The person we scanned had too much pain for us to continue. The tattoo was not new. I recall another similar incident too. I also have a colleague who scanned someone with recently tattooed eyebrows and the MR caused very significant pain.
The problem would seem to be under reported (see links below which make it seem fairly rare). That said, we don’t have anyone we would report it to and rely on techs talking to each other and sharing these things - which happens regularly.
New risks are discovered fairly regularly. In recent memory: smart rings, squirreled away blood sugar monitors, penile implants, penile beads, hair extensions that are attached with wire. A low level of trust is key.
ROHS solder, aka lead-free solder, is more difficult to work with so "worse", sure, but on the flip side you don't inhale lead fumes which accumulate in your body (i.e. will never leave your body) and have the delayed effect of causing lead poisoning which can do anything from making you stupider to literally killing you. I'd say the good outweighs the bad here and maybe leaded solder shouldn't be sold to amateurs who don't work in labs under vents.
I'm not sure what you're arguing for. Keep selling products that disable and kill people until the technology improves and the market selects for the superior product? Because history has demonstrated that that rarely works out as long as the option that kills and disables people is cheap enough to outweigh the immediate drawbacks. Especially when consumers think they're immune.
> lead-free solder, is more difficult to work with
This kind of statement always puzzles me. Leaded solder was an absolute nightmare to use for me, after the switch to the lead-free one I was suddenly much better at soldering within minutes. It was like going from square to round wheels.
I haven't had the (dis)pleasure of working with leaded solder myself so I'm going by anecdotes but lead-free solder seems to have a higher melting point so presumably it's easier to damage components through overheating when working with lead-free solder than leaded solder.
Either way, my point is that regardless of whether there are benefits, they're not worth dying for (or suffering from lead poisoning).
I was arguing for making things better (at the expense of some good solutions)
The people that complain are correct. For example, asbestos IS a good technical solution! But it is worse in the big picture, therefore we need another solution that might not be perfect.
Polyvinylidene chloride wrap somehow isn't widely regulated yet in the US, the formula for popular plastic wrap was voluntarily changed. AFAIK you can still get the "good" stuff at restaurant supply stores and certain retailers, but it's carcinogens do leach into food.
enamel paint on cars was traditionally the best paint, and lead or oil based paints the best for houses/etc. But now we use water-based paints because they are safer for lead content or chemical fumes when drying.
Congress only authorizes executive branch agencies to have responsibility for certain things, and tattoos are not within scope, not being a medical treatment of any sort.
BTW FDA was explicitly barred by a corrupt law* from regulating anything "natural" (a poorly defined criterion) so the same happens with all those things you see in Whole Foods: FDA can warn you of certain dangers from their web site but that's it.
* Herbalife got their senator, Orrin Hatch, to get this law passed so they would stop getting in trouble for peddling snake oil in both their products and their MLM business model. His career was basically 100% carrying water for MLM folks and the music industry in exchange for cash.
Yes pretty much, unless there is another senator that's actively opposing it. But lots of tiny laws with big implications get stuck on to spending bills and get passed with no opposition.
For example, the corruption at the Atlanta airport is mind boggling. The airport is actually owned and run by the city and when the corruption becomes over bearing to the point that it had serious impacts, like the semi-recent power outage, the state legislature threatens to take over operations to keep the city in check.
So one of the senators from GA just recently slipped a line into a spending bill that would make it nearly impossible for the state to do so.
No, but one senator can generally block most laws by just declaring that they would filibuster if they had to. And blocking can very easily become “block unless this is added.” We’re only a couple steps removed from the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm at this point.
I don't think this is true. According to the FDA's site they could regulate tattoo inks but have chosen not to.
> FDA considers the inks used in intradermal tattoos, including permanent makeup, to be cosmetics. When we identify a safety problem associated with a cosmetic, including a tattoo ink, we investigate and take action, as appropriate, to prevent consumer illness or injury. The pigments used in the inks are color additives, which are subject to premarket approval under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. However, because of other competing public health priorities and a previous lack of evidence of safety problems specifically associated with these pigments, FDA traditionally has not exercised regulatory authority for color additives on the pigments used in tattoo inks. The actual practice of tattooing is regulated by local jurisdictions.
Whereas in South Korea only licensed medical professionals are allowed to open tattoo parlors:
> The Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare considers the act of tattooing similar to medical procedures and deemed they should therefore only be performed by a professional with a medical license.
The FDA is not empowered to regulate medical procedures. Those are regulated by state laws and agencies. So even if tattooing was considered a medical procedure the FDA would not be able to regulate them.
https://theworld.org/stories/2019/10/24/south-koreas-imperil... good read. I live in Korea and have had a lot of my tats done here, people seem to not care much about the tattoo shops, at least the artists I'm friends with said they have no fear of prosecution.
>In the U.S., the FDA refused approval to market thalidomide, saying further studies were needed. This reduced the impact of thalidomide in U.S. patients. The refusal was largely due to pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey who withstood pressure from the Richardson-Merrell Pharmaceuticals Co.
>In the United States, the new regulations strengthened the FDA, among other ways, by requiring applicants to prove efficacy and to disclose all side effects encountered in testing. The FDA subsequently initiated the Drug Efficacy Study Implementation to reclassify drugs already on the market.
Nice case of mood affiliation - "FDA bad therefore remember inverse of reality"
There was a swift ban on Thalidomide and the FDA went to the extreme of removing fertile women from all trials for the next 60 years, leading to 2nd order effects like Ambien car crashes.
We ended up using India ink, which (according to the encyclopedia of ink* ) is mainly soot.
We were able to isolate it in the HPLC and through some histopath experiments show that it didn’t have any negative local effect between (IIRC) seven and 60 days. Why those times? Protocol was to tattoo on day 0, wait a week for the site to recover, then inject our experimental material on day 7, sacrificing subject animals at D14 (one week), 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, and 56 days.
I don’t think lamp black is really a good idea, but was adequate for our purposes. We didn’t have to do any kind of long term study, just demonstrate that it would not interfere with our work in guinea pigs.
* I actually went to a specialist art store and the owner did indeed go to the back of the store and pull out one of the volumes of a multi-volume work on inks and pigments! I don’t know if it was actually named “The Encyclopedia of Ink”, though I do remember that that’s how he referred to it. He just photocopied the relevant page for me, most of which was the entry for India ink.
But soot is carcinogenic, no? And with soot consisting of nanoparticles small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, I can imagine a chance of soot-based tattoo substances diffusing into the brain.
But, as with anything, it’s about nuance. You can read through the ingredients here[0] and tell me what you’d like in your body.
The earliest tattoos, from my understanding, were done by incision and rubbing carbon into the wound. Regardless if you use old or new inks/techniques, it’s not really cut and dry to say “this is bad/good” because the size of the particulates matter. For a tattoo shop that uses high quality ink, and is diligent in its sterilization, most inks are fine. The large molecules are “trapped” by your immune system to just stay there[1], making them not dangerous.
There is a ton of research on PubMed about tattoos, most being negative. However, I suspect it’s because the authors had a predisposition to be negative from the start based on how the research is conducted and what they focus on. But I could be wrong and you should make up your own mind.
Bottom line: if you get tattoos, pay the premium and go to a good shop. The hygiene and good products are worth it, if that’s your thing.
Why not? We tattoo all sorts of food animals, which is what they were originally bred for (and I can confirm from experience that they are yummy — they are street food in the Andes).
Not that I have eaten the ones bred for medical research. But a fun side point: we did drug program for which the FDA insisted that preclinical studies be done in mini pigs (similar to human skin) though our research program had been in guinea pigs. The Göttingen mini pigs, like many experimental program animals, are carefully inbred so you can get a group that are genetically quite similar. We had to do the study in Toronto because the labs in California claimed they were being outbid by certain restaurants who wanted pork short ribs.
I was (and remain) convinced that this was some kind of racist joke (among other things these kinds of animals are quite expensive), but multiple people swore it was true.
So maybe you have eaten an animal intended for scientific research.
How things have changed. 30 years ago we said "please get your pets tattooed" because ear tattoos were how veterinarians reunited lost animals with their humans. Now we use RFID tags and tattooing is frowned upon.
Ironically, while working on a drug program that involved intradermal injection, we needed to tattoo the injection site so we could find it later. The FDA was very demanding that both the procedure and more importantly to them the dye would not have any effect that might alter the body’s response to the compound under test. We had to do a whole study just to validate this.
So the FDA is concerned about this issue for guinea pigs, but is barred from investigating the effect on humans. All they can do is publish advice on their web site.