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Science

Microplastics Found in Every Human Testicle in Study (theguardian.com) 170

Posted by msmash from the more-you-know dept.
Microplastics have been found in human testicles, with researchers saying the discovery might be linked to declining sperm counts in men. From a report: The scientists tested 23 human testes, as well as 47 testes from pet dogs. They found microplastic pollution in every sample. The human testicles had been preserved and so their sperm count could not be measured. However, the sperm count in the dogs' testes could be assessed and was lower in samples with higher contamination with PVC. The study demonstrates a correlation but further research is needed to prove microplastics cause sperm counts to fall.

Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades, with chemical pollution such as pesticides implicated by many studies. Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people's bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory. Vast amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water as well as breathing them in. The particles could lodge in tissue and cause inflammation, as air pollution particles do, or chemicals in the plastics could cause harm. In March, doctors warned of potentially life-threatening effects after finding a substantially raised risk of stroke, heart attack and earlier death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microscopic plastics.
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Microplastics Found in Every Human Testicle in Study More

Microplastics Found in Every Human Testicle in Study

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  • So, can we just revert to glass, wood, and metal? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nycsubway ( 79012 ) on Monday May 20, 2024 @11:44AM (#64485431) Homepage

    It seems simple. Microplastics are now found (because we know to look) in every part of our body, in our drinking water, in the ait we breathe. Perhaps its time to stop using plastics as readily. We banned the use of leaded gasoline because it was found to be contaminating everything with lead, so why not do that with plastic

    • Re:So, can we just revert to glass, wood, and meta (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Monday May 20, 2024 @11:51AM (#64485455)
      I used to work for some lawyers. The big shot who was the head of the firm was so against plastics he banned the firm from buying any products made from plastic without his permission. When I got a little office in the back of the firm, all the furniture was wood, leather, cloth, etc... My desk was wood and finished with a simple oil finish (as a woodworker, I found it interesting). When I talked with him about it once, he told me he was militant about plastics for two reasons. First, because he believed anything connected with oil was a carcinogen. So, he felt any exposure to plastic was too much.

      The second reason was also interesting. He said that he felt folks who had money and brains had a natural, if perhaps unconscious, bias against things made from plastic. He was a bit of a rich elitist and he felt that only poor folks used plastic goods and doing so made them look poor, too. In a law firm, people need to get the impression the place is successful and well off. He felt the best way to give that impression was to only have wood, glass, and metal items visible. He didn't even allow plastic writing implements.

      • Are you listening?

        Plastics.

      • Hah. I was at one private firm briefly that made a ton of money for little effort, with lots of money sloshing around. But we were moving buildings to a new site, in a new upscale Del Mar building (embarrassing when they had to reprint the business cards because it was technically in San Diego). The upstairs executive and sales area was all rosewood and mahogany desks and cabinets and banisters, with granite surfaces for the conference room tables. So sad that so little of that money got shared with me,

      • First, because he believed anything connected with oil was a carcinogen. So, he felt any exposure to plastic was too much.

        It's just carbon and hydrogen.

        • "Just" carbon and hydrogen? I'm tempted to take that personally, seeing as I'm 93% oxygen + carbon + hydrogen myself.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • I'm so incredibly under-qualified to represent the chemistry, biochemistry, or health impact he claimed. It was his heuristic, though. He he said more or less was "You've cleaned oil spills up on Galveston's beaches you know how foul crude oil is. It kills anything it touches. The biproducts aren't any different, just more varied and possibly slower to give you cancer."
      • I'll never revert to meta, although I do like the Quest 3.
      • Did he ride a horse to work every day, with leather +metal saddle and rains? If he drove a car, took a cab, or public transportation, they had plastics, unless he paid many millions for a custom modern carbon fiber & metal car, or drove a wooden Ford Model T or a similar vintage car.

      • He was a bit of a rich elitist

        "A bit." Ugh. The worst of that is that I actually agree with him, aesthetically speaking.

        It's very difficult to get away from plastics entirely though, if you want things like a functioning computer. Was this back when CRT monitors were viable? I can't picture an LCD that doesn't use any plastic at all.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 )

      Plastic is truly unrivaled as a packaging material: it's very light and durable but not extremely strong like, say e.g. steel, it has an almost infinite lifespan (relative to what is wrapped in it), it's easy to produce, it can be transparent (that's important for some stuff).

      If we try to replace it, we'll have to 1) change people's habits 2) probably make things more expensive and that's not going to be welcomed.

      • If we stop externalizing costs (Score:4, Informative)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday May 20, 2024 @12:40PM (#64485579)
        things won't be more expensive. But plastic lets you do that in thousands of ways. You don't pay for the health problems is causes, you don't pay for securing cheap oil to make the stuff, for the fake recycling campaigns and the infrastructure that goes into them, probably some other stuff I'm not thinking of too.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by whitroth ( 9367 )

        Bull. Why is cereal, for example, or graham crackers, wrapped in plastic, that used to be wrapped in (far easier to open) waxed paper?

        • Re:So, can we just revert to glass, wood, and meta (Score:5, Informative)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday May 20, 2024 @01:18PM (#64485701)

          If you want to reduce your exposure to microplastics, look at your clothing, not just your food.

          Dust from synthetic textiles like polyester is one of the biggest sources of human exposure.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by gustep12 ( 1161613 )

            I think you are right. Makes me think back on how I once got a new comforter with a "microfiber" fabric shell, you know this smooth fake silky type of fabric. When I fluffed up that comforter, it released so much fiber dust that the air looked hazy, and the surrounding surfaces were suddenly covered with a layer of "dust" of the same color as the comforter. Even washing it didn't help. Now i know it was literally a microplastic-spewing health hazard, Ugh.

        • Why is cereal, for example, or graham crackers, wrapped in plastic,

          Also Laura Palmer.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Njovich ( 553857 )

          waxed paper

          Careful what you wish for. 'Wax', either the natural (paraffin) form or the synthetic PET forms, is polymers. Due to the ease of degrading it's also polymers that can easily lead to microplastic in your food, much easier than say a simple PET packaging.

          • Better watch out, most food comes with glucose polymers or amino acid polymers, and it's 100% made of chemicals. Personally though I'm more concerned with artificial ones.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Njovich ( 553857 )

              Fine, I should have specified that more. PET wax is made of effectively the plastic that the wrapper is. Paraffin wax a simple hydrocarbon polymer is at the molecular level so similar to being a plastic that I suggest thinking twice before people assume it's safe based on 'not being plastic'.

              • Yeah, I looked up paraffin afterwards, and it's "natural" in the sense of being extracted from petroleum. Definitely not something my ancestors interacted with, but as a molecule it looks fairly simple and inert, compared to the repeating units of most plastics (and their added plasticizers, dyes, etc).

        • the problem is the waxed paper is waxed with petroleum based wax.
      • You also described glass, which is infinitely recyclable and is largely what plastic displaced. And plastic doesn't recycle basically at all.

        • Yeah, think about unboxing a glass-wrapped USB memory stick. let me know how that works out.

          • The right material for the job in this case would be paper/wood. However, replacing drink containers with glass wouldn't be difficult or particularly expensive. They already exist and recycling glass is a real thing, not a hand waving exercise like it is with plastic. If plastics hurt people, those folks have a right to petition for a redress of grievance with the courts. This is one reason why I think freedom-lovers are often smeared as hard right conservatives who want to pave the planet and dump Benezene

            • Yeah, it would be awesome to see glass-only drinking recipients at concerts.
              Bonus: the broken glass carpet that would quickly form.

              While I understand what you say, and I agree with you, in reality we (human species) are on a no-return road.

      • Plastic is truly unrivaled as a packaging material: it's very light and durable but not extremely strong like, say e.g. steel, it has an almost infinite lifespan (relative to what is wrapped in it), it's easy to produce, it can be transparent (that's important for some stuff).

        If we try to replace it, we'll have to 1) change people's habits 2) probably make things more expensive and that's not going to be welcomed.

        We could also make consumers of single use plastics pay for the cleanup and fixing the environmental issues plastic pollution causes. Maybe that would make limited shelf life packaging materials that biodegrade and can be turned into compost a more attractive option. Just being able to compost waste food in the original packaging would be a huge step forward never mind being able to just compost most non food related packaging material as well. We have sent probes to the edge of the solar system, created ai

      • I can wrap a sandwich in waxed paper. I don't strictly need cling film on all my food. There are lots of ways to reduce the amount of plastic we come in daily contact with. Perhaps making smartphones out of metal, and have replacable electronics. But the sealing layer on the display will likely always be plastic, even if the screen is made from glass or has a layer of sapphire glass.

        • half the wax paper you can buy is polyethylene coated, which results in microplastics getting into whatever you're wrapping with it. There's bees and parafin wax kind if you really want to get picky.

      • Ah, but go back to packaging stuff in paper. Then you've got to deal with all those paper mills spewing poisons into rivers...

        I think it's the lifetimes of plastics that cause the most concern. The long lasting stuff is easy to make, the kind that naturally biodegrades easily is difficult (most of the types now won't biodegrade in a backyard compost). The problems are that plastic is used in so many food products - lining the cardboard for milk cartons, the lining of soft drink cans, etc.

    • No. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday May 20, 2024 @12:37PM (#64485565)
      There's a multi-billion dollar plastics industry that isn't gonna site idly by while you eliminate it.

      We'd need a *massive* change to how basically everything works to fix that.
    • Except with leaded gasoline, it stopped being a problem once we stopped using it. We're only now just beginning to see the first wave of microplastics from the early adoption of plastics. It's going to get thousands of times worse before it gets better. Plastic may have already doomed us as a species.

    • I suppose microparticles of wood, metal, and glass would be more palatable to our bodies.

  • It takes a lot of balls (Score:5, Funny)

    by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Monday May 20, 2024 @11:52AM (#64485457)

    It takes a lot of balls to do a study like this!

  • Between the nuclear and oil industries, humanity is a sad expense. If you were filthy rich you could afford a plastic-less life. So it is really your own fault now isn't it? Now go pay those taxes and enjoy your life as an expendable slave

    • It's not like the communist countries have an amazing track record of environmentalism. The Aral Sea is probably the worst ecological disaster of the past several centuries and there weren't any greedy capitalists involved with that mess. You're also completely ignoring how many lives have been saved due to plastics. If your choice is a lower sperm count or death, you'll probably be okay with a few less swimmers. Now that we're aware of the problem all we need to do is find designs for plastics that don't c

      • It's not like the communist countries have an amazing track record of environmentalism. The Aral Sea is probably the worst ecological disaster of the past several centuries and there weren't any greedy capitalists involved with that mess. You're also completely ignoring how many lives have been saved due to plastics. If your choice is a lower sperm count or death, you'll probably be okay with a few less swimmers. Now that we're aware of the problem all we need to do is find designs for plastics that don't cause these problems.

        You can try to offload this on communism as much as you want but the biggest environmental and ecological disaster of in the history of this planet is the behaviour and mentality of humanity itself completely independently of political ideologies. Capitalist societies, and even pre industrial societies caused far bigger ecological disasters than the Aral Sea by wiping out scores of species across entire continents. Carbon and methane emissions are a far bigger environmental disaster than the Aral Sea ever

      • Nobody said anything about communist countries. Your de focusing skills need considerable work. What the fuck does communist countries have to do with plastic in my ballsack?

        Now go waste someone else's time.

    • Capitalism and humanity are opposing forces.
      • One has to consider individual rights before considering the economic ruleset. Capitalism works better than most other systems, but needs some respect for individual rights before it can be used for used for good reasons. Communism on the other hand, just gets people killed directly, rather than waiting for plastics or pollution.

    • Between the nuclear and oil industries, humanity is a sad expense. If you were filthy rich you could afford a plastic-less life. So it is really your own fault now isn't it? Now go pay those taxes and enjoy your life as an expendable slave

      Even the filthy rich don't live a plastic free life. Micro and nano plastics are everywhere and that includes the water and the food the filthy rich consume.

  • Testicular cancer anyone? (Score:3)

    by fjorder ( 5219645 ) on Monday May 20, 2024 @12:28PM (#64485533)
    I had testicular cancer 15 years ago, always suspected it was from shit like this. I swore off microwave popcorn but thatâ(TM)s nothing more than symbolic, this poison is everywhere and itâ(TM)s slowly killing us.

  • As if we don't have enough worries. The next generation of humans will be Barbies and Kens.

  • If microplastics were so pervasive you might expect to see some odd effects, like hormonal changes and perhaps gender issues... certainly microplastics and gender dysphoria have a correlation in newspaper mentions

  • Wouldn't that be the kicker? We poison our reproduction.

  • Biodegradible Dick Implants doing the biodegrade bit inside your body

  • Whose job was it to examine testicles?

  • The Bizarro Times
    All the nooz you never imagined.

    May 20, 2024
    Nooz from our Washington Bureau.

    Reporting from the Junk Desk.
    Plastic Balls
    Story by Az-Saguaro

    In response to recent articles like "Microplastics Found in Every Human Testicle in Study", society finally seems to be getting it up to take on major polluters.

    It takes a lot of balls to challenge an industry as big as the plastics consortium. But, under pressure from consumer interest groups, Congress has finally held hearings about the health risks of

  • Roughly 5% of women are found to have macroplastics in their boobs.

  • Less population = less destruction of nature, and less global warming. Something poetic about microplastics saving us from overpopulation too. Bring it on.. But maybe stop juuuust before the 2006 movie "Children of men" type scenario.
  • i checked

  • Please explain (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @10:17AM (#64487821)

    ... where they got dog's balls [pinimg.com].

  • Every? (Score:3)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @11:45AM (#64488057)

    Every? I don't recall them checking mine.

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