Microplastics Found Deep in Lungs of Living People for First Time (theguardian.com) 73
Microplastic pollution has been discovered lodged deep in the lungs of living people for the first time. The particles were found in almost all the samples analysed. From a report: The scientists said microplastic pollution was now ubiquitous across the planet, making human exposure unavoidable and meaning "there is an increasing concern regarding the hazards" to health. Samples were taken from tissue removed from 13 patients undergoing surgery and microplastics were found in 11 cases. The most common particles were polypropylene, used in plastic packaging and pipes, and PET, used in bottles. Two previous studies had found microplastics at similarly high rates in lung tissue taken during autopsies.
People were already known to breathe in the tiny particles, as well as consuming them via food and water. Workers exposed to high levels of microplastics are also known to have developed disease. Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time in March, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.
People were already known to breathe in the tiny particles, as well as consuming them via food and water. Workers exposed to high levels of microplastics are also known to have developed disease. Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time in March, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.
oh well (Score:3)
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Altogether now. Progress! Progress! Progress! Can't stop it. Don't want to stop it because one's a Luddite otherwise. What could possible go wrong with such a life philosophy?
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Re: Not extinct yet (Score:1)
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Absolutely. I happen to like being part plastic. Just put it in with the fluoride.
--
If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends? - Steven Wright
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Being plastic didn't bother Rory Williams very much. He still got Amy in the end.
By the way, N-95 masks are typically polypropylene.
Re:Not extinct yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Because evolution doesn't care what happens to you after you're, say, 40 years old. Likewise *sheer numbers* is hardly a reasonable measure of quality of life; if that were the case you should move to China.
Between *kills your right away* and *no problem at all*, there is a vast space filled with things that are a reasonable concern.
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Are we seeing mass deaths of 40 year olds?
Are we seeing meaningful reduction in life expectancy at all?
Or is it perhaps that we see nothing that would indicate that this is a problem at all, and all we have is people telling obvious falsehoods that can be debunked with just a cursory test of "is implied consequence real of FUD?" by simply taking the suggestion, i.e. "is life expectancy going down in any meaningful way for unknown reason to the point where we should consider novel reasons we don't know yet?"
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So you accept the dichotomy that something either outright kills you or is no problem at all.
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I accept YOUR dichotomy, for the sake of this argument, yes.
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I proposed that dichotomy as an obviously ridiculous way of looking at the problem that nonetheless represents how many people think.
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Or perhaps you proposed it because you have zero evidence of any kind in spite of now years of intensive research to find any?
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I proposed it because it is how people like you scare quotes "think".
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And this is why we as humans can't have nice things. There will always be fear merchants, happy to market the latest "it's going to kill you, for real this time!" Even if there's nothing in it for them.
Sad.
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No, people can't have nice things because they aren't rational. They think like you do, in terms of strawmen that reduce the effort. "Fear merchants" and all that bullshit have absolutely nothing to do with this other than to make it easy for you to reduce things to something simple, like good guys/bad guys.
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It's funny to me that you still are stuck on the dichotomy you yourself opened with. As if you already forgot both that you were the one who opened with it, and the fact that you were reminded about it when you first chose to forget this inconvenient fact.
In this regard, I would argue that your argument about lack of rationality is projection.
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Or maybe they'll turn out like acid. Just eat people from inside. Or maybe they'll turn out something like cobolt-60. Cause acute radiation sickness. Or maybe they'll be like viagra. Give people painful erections.
Do you have any evidence for you supposition? Any at all? Note that there has been intensive and well funded research into potential harm of microplastics for many years at this point. So if you don't, but you still peddle this FUD anyway, that just makes you a FUD merchant.
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Do you have any evidence for you supposition?
The last sentence in my comment: "I'm not intending to imply that microplastics have the same hazards as asbestos, merely pointing out that we don't know yet.
Note that there has been intensive and well funded research into potential harm of microplastics for many years at this point.
Care to reference those published research papers? My late-afternoon-effort-level-Google-fu came up pretty empty. I was just going with the summary (this is Slashdot, after all) comment of "The impact on health is as yet unknown."
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>"The impact on health is as yet unknown."
Translation from Fear Merchant to English: "We studied it extensively and found no impact on health. We need much more grant money to study it even more. Give!"
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Ah, I think I see how it works now. Let me try.
"We studied it extensively and found no impact on health."
Translation from reality to whatever your world is: "I watched a couple of Youtube videos on the topic, now I have irrefutable research that backs up my argument. I'm not going to share them of course, because you should do your own research." Did I do it right?
Now that we've both got the smart-ass out of our systems, how about a real conversation if you're up for it? I spent a few minutes trying to find articles that support your claims, I came up with none
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Link me the "this is bad" one. Because it seems the other one you found states exactly what I stated. "We haven't found anything, ergo we don't know yet, ergo we need more grant money to study more because we might find something".
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"We haven't found anything, ergo we don't know yet, ergo we need more grant money to study more because we might find something".
Yes, that's how research generally works. With as ubiquitous as this contaminant has been found do be, and its ability to readily enter our body, I'd rather know with as much of a degree of confidence as possible whether it's har
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Ah, you don't know how to read the studies. "Linked to" means "we dosed them to the brim, and we still couldn't establish causal link to problems we observed in target animals". That article study makes no claim you think it does, because you read it like those that wrote the study want you to read it.
Hence the choice of words. You need to look at the actual meaning of the words.
This article also has the gigantic red flag of "microplastics" articles, in that it intentionally seeks to conflate microplastics
Fitness is about reproduction (Score:2)
Re:Not extinct yet (Score:5, Insightful)
If microplastics are so bad, why aren't we extinct yet?
Because other improvements are offsetting the drag produced by microplastics.
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If microplastics are so bad, why aren't we extinct yet?
Because other improvements are offsetting the drag produced by microplastics.
Other things like, say, the use of plastics in housing, medicine, industry? The contribution of plastics to quality of life, cleanliness, etc.?
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You are like the "No Springs" [youtube.com] guy
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Plastics are like nuclear. Up front you get a big payoff, but the problems mount until it's no longer profitable. We're putting this shit into the environment in such a dispersed fashion that the only technology we could ever hope to remove it with is true universal assembler type nanotechnology... which would enable us to create pollution on a scale never before even imagined. I don't think we're going to get that far, though. We'll do ourselves in with industrial technology before we ever reach a post-ind
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Plastics are like nuclear. Up front you get a big payoff, but the problems mount until it's no longer profitable. We're putting this shit into the environment in such a dispersed fashion that the only technology we could ever hope to remove it with is true universal assembler type nanotechnology... which would enable us to create pollution on a scale never before even imagined. I don't think we're going to get that far, though. We'll do ourselves in with industrial technology before we ever reach a post-industrial age.
I was responding to this:
If microplastics are so bad, why aren't we extinct yet?
Because other improvements are offsetting the drag produced by microplastics.
And my question was:
Other things like, say, the use of plastics in housing, medicine, industry? The contribution of plastics to quality of life, cleanliness, etc.?
It was a serious question. Lifespans have gone up, not down, while plastic usage increased. Plastics are used extensively in housing, medicine, consumer products, safety systems, etc. It's a legitimate question whether the undeniable health benefits of plastic are (among other things) what has outweighed admittedly "unknown" (i.e. unproven) risks.
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what has outweighed admittedly "unknown" (i.e. unproven) risks.
Better drugs, better early diagnostics, etc.
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I was thinking this same thing...
Make people breathe through these damned masks for 2 years and then suddenly as one pandemic subsides because something flashier and more horrifying is on the news, we have a new deadly concern of microplastics in the lungs.
FFS I just want to live out in the woods where I can breathe campfire smoke if I want to damage my lungs, play in the dirt and not wash my hands if I want to catch a strange illness, drink whiskey I've made myself from corn I've grown myself, and generall
duh is right. (Score:2)
You know, we could have looked at the lungs of doctors and nurses any time in the last 30 years and discovered this. If it were true.
Out of the box, a face mask doesn't have detectable levels of micro plastics. throw it in the environment and let it degrade long enough, then yea. But I don't think people are placing masks with holes and covered in lichen back on their face.
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Doctors and nurses tend to grab a mask, use it for a short time, throw it away, grab another one.
But for covid? I suppose some people did that (and the number of masks I see littering the ground everywhere I go seems to indicate a lot of people were reaching for a new mask fairly often), but a lot of people repeatedly wore the same mask after crumpling it up in a pocket, sitting on it, etc. All that is much more likely to break up the fibers in the mask and make it possible to inhale them.
Also... you're r
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No one was looking for micro plastics in lungs 30 years ago, or 20, or 10, or even 5
Well the term "microplastics" only goes back to 2004. But people have been aware of fine solid particle from industry and their effects on the human body, primary the lungs, for longer than we've been talking about microplastics. It's new twist on an old problem with pollution.
I stopped at 6 years. There are lots more papers I can't see due to paywalls (and laziness):
October 2021 [nature.com] and August 2021 [sciencedirect.com]
August 2020 [nih.gov]
October 2019 [researchgate.net] and June 2019 [nature.com]
March 2018 [sciencedirect.com] and February 2018 [sciencedirect.com]
July 2016 [sciencedaily.com]
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I think you're trying to be clever, but last time I checked:
- medical professionals use them once, then dispose
- medical professionals tend not to use them outdoors or in degrading environments
- medical professionals are trained how to wear, and remove, such articles properly
Now we have millions, nay BILLIONS of untrained people whose primary motivation is to just get the damned thing off, wearing them repeatedly (sometimes the same one for MONTHS of constant use) in the sun, wind, and weather, who in betwe
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And in a lot of cases, chewing on them too, quite literally. I can't count how many times I've seen this (mostly from children, who until very recently have been required to wear the damned things something like 8+ hours/day in their indoctrination facilities).
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Maybe step back from hairsplitting Mr Pedant.
Quick question: Do you think the point of the argument /meaningfully/ changes if we're talking about N95, KN95, or surgical masks, etc?
Or perhaps your 'point' is merely quibbling?
Did you want to argue about spelling next?
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Modern medicine cannot exist without plastics (Score:2)
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Put the medical plastics in an incinerator. Then no micro plastics are released in the environment.
Nobody is suggesting we stop practicing modern medicine (except maybe kooks). A little responsibility for the waste we produce as a society is warranted though. If we cannot consume and dispose of products in a safe manner, then we should cease producing them. There will be a different answer to this question for every industry.
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We could reduce the plastic pollution in multiple ways, though. One way is to use less plastic and more glass, but the glass has to be reused because recycling it costs just as much energy as producing it. And that opens up a whole bunch of other issues. Same for stainless. Another way to use less plastic is to use at least less petroleum plastic, and use more biodegradable plastics [aizenconsulting.com]. Tubing could be constructed with a thin layer of the usual plastic covered by a thicker protective jacket made of something m
George Carlin was right (Score:1)
Plastics don't spread like this by accident - George Carlin was right the the reason the Earth created Humans was so that it could have plastic [youtu.be].
Now that the plastic is there, humans should be concerned with our purpose having been fulfilled...
Excuse me sir, may I have more plastic? (Score:2)
I'm on my way to health in this age of the plastic miracle.
My body was full of asbestos, lead, mercury, second hand smoke, acid rain, volcanic ash, forest fire debris and the toxic dust from the twin towers. I tell ya, breathing was hard!
Now, thank heaven, microplastic is displacing all that poison with good clean American plastic. Every day I cough out a bit more of that nasty stuff and, ahh, breathe in the perfect plastic purifying pollution solution.
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- and when I die, my plastic encrusted body will not need cremation. It will outlast the pyramids.
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I don't follow you. "Leftists" raised the alarm that plastics weren't biodegradable decades ago and so the plastic companies responded with a marketing campaign around recycling, even though they knew that plastics are barely recyclable. So you blame the "leftists" for ... what? Not being your QAnon brothers?
Think plastic is bad? (Score:2)
I can't wait to see what happens with graphene and nanoparticles.
Unknown (Score:2)
The impact on health is as yet unknown
Certainly reason to look into it, but it's quite as possible that the benefits of plastics outweigh the negatives. In this case, we don't even know if there are any negatives yet.