Microplastics Are Infiltrating Brain Tissue, Studies Show (theguardian.com) 118
A growing body of scientific evidence shows that microplastics are accumulating in critical human organs, including the brain, leading researchers to call for more urgent actions to rein in plastic pollution. From a report: Studies have detected tiny shards and specks of plastics in human lungs, placentas, reproductive organs, livers, kidneys, knee and elbow joints, blood vessels and bone marrow. Given the research findings, "it is now imperative to declare a global emergency" to deal with plastic pollution, said Sedat Gundogdu, who studies microplastics at Cukurova University in Turkey. Humans are exposed to microplastics -- defined as fragments smaller than 5mm in diameter -- and the chemicals used to make plastics from widespread plastic pollution in air, water and even food.
The health hazards of microplastics within the human body are not yet well-known. Recent studies are just beginning to suggest they could increase the risk of various conditions such as oxidative stress, which can lead to cell damage and inflammation, as well as cardiovascular disease. Animal studies have also linked microplastics to fertility issues, various cancers, a disrupted endocrine and immune system, and impaired learning and memory.
The health hazards of microplastics within the human body are not yet well-known. Recent studies are just beginning to suggest they could increase the risk of various conditions such as oxidative stress, which can lead to cell damage and inflammation, as well as cardiovascular disease. Animal studies have also linked microplastics to fertility issues, various cancers, a disrupted endocrine and immune system, and impaired learning and memory.
Counterpoint: (Score:2)
Blister packs are so convenient for businesses, and rich people can afford the microplastic filtering systems being developed, so they'll be fine!
Re: (Score:2)
Blister packs are so convenient for businesses, and rich people can afford the microplastic filtering systems being developed, so they'll be fine!
Be fine? As if some rich person is going to find any premium sushi plastic free within a decade, no matter how much they pay.
Lead poisoning is sooo 20th Centuy. The new hot sick, is plastic. What’s the same, is the ignorance.
Re: (Score:2)
What’s the same, is the ignorance.
Yep. The one thing you can always depend on with humans in large enough groups.
Concern != Emergency (Score:5, Informative)
This may be a new and definitely concerning discovery, but the article itself states, "the health hazards of microplastics within the human body are not yet well-known" then followed by lots of suspicion that they are bad but only suspicion. Given that, perhaps we'd better find out whether they do pose a serious health hazard before we panic and start calling it an emergency? This will also help us to determine how much effort we need to put in to preventing these microplastics.
Also, if you are going to call them "micro" plastics then perhaps the size definition should be tightened up a little since 5 mm is 5,000 "micro" metres, and I hope at least an order or two of magnitude larger than any piece they found in a brain, otherwise rather than pollution as the cause I suspect they were hit in the head by something large and plastic!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
First they'd have to find some that don't already have them.
public water supplies and filtering plastic (Score:2)
Anyone care to guess that public drinking water supplies do not filter out enough microplastics?
And consider that man-made clothes fibers lose millions of micro plastics every time you wash them.
Either would be consider a national emergency considering that nearly all water used for drinking, cooking, bathing is from a municipal water supply.
And then there is the fringe about how many chemicals are not filtered out of the water supply, such as the effect of illegal drug residue and estrogen birth control pi
Behold the power of plastic (Score:2)
And it's probably making everyone fat, too.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, it revolutionized how we can store food in many forms, leading to higher levels of food engineered for shelf stability and portability, but at the same time making it worse for us (calories and content) and overall far too available to the point it encourages overeating.
RFK Jr.: (Score:3)
It's okay, my brain-worm is gobbling it up.
Re: (Score:2)
what we need here, is more brainworm
Re: (Score:2)
what we need here, is more brainworm
I've got a fever and the only cure is... the healing powers of a Goa'uld symbiote.
(because I'm all out of cowbell)
Re: (Score:2)
omg, you have just explained away most politicians.
Future of Recycling? (Score:2)
Just Stop Plastic (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Just Stop Plastic (Score:5, Interesting)
I would go further, and say that their antics actually repelled possible converts to their cause. So much so that I can't help but idly wonder if maybe they're secretly being funded by Big Oil as part of a false flag operation.
But I can certainly relate to the desperation.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Just Stop Plastic (Score:2)
That's one big oil painting.
Synthetic clothes (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how much synthetic garments contribute? Living in a cold country, fleece in particular would be very hard to cost effectively replace. Would a water filter solution be viable if needed?
Re:Synthetic clothes (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how much synthetic garments contribute?
I recently got one of those UV flashlights for spotting urine from pets or vermin. I was surprised to find that all of the dusty surfaces in my house glowed brightly.
I guessed that it was because a large proportion of the dust is lint from clothing, and it glows because laundry detergents have UV brighteners. A quick internet search confirmed my theory.
Although we have a lot of 100% cotton clothes, there are plenty of synthetic blends and some 100% synthetic items, so a good proportion of this dust is microplastics. Looking at all the glowing residue highlights just how much plastic everyone is inhaling or ingesting every day.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for posting, that's an interesting find. I'm most concerned about water based pollution, washing machines out and water in, I didn't even think about dust.
Re:Synthetic clothes (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, so, only synthetic blends glow under the UV light?
Reading comprehension isn't your forte, is it?
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, natural blends also glow, because of detergent. But a significant fraction of the glowing dust is synthetics, and therefore plastic, and small enough to inhale.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I read long ago that the biggest source for the really tiny plastic was clothing. It makes sense enough and I don't know why we only call microplastic 5mm when the stuff found inside living cells is way smaller and NEW clothing itself is under 0.5 mm.
So can we call these nanoplastics? it's not like we are following SI prefixes with microplastics...
Re: (Score:2)
A quick search and nanoplastics is a thing and in many cases probably the correct term when microplastics is used. I'm not so sure it's worth the effort to distinguish between the two in casual conversation, but you are right.
Re: (Score:3)
Microplastics are all plastic fragments smaller than 5mm. So, the stuff you're describing are microplastics too.
Re: (Score:2)
The prefix micro does have scientific meaning which does not cover >= 1mm which is milli-meters not micro-meters which are 1000 times smaller.
HUGE difference between 5 mm and 0.1 mm; I can feel stepping on a 5mm pebble. 0.1 can be inhaled into my lungs. A dust mite is 0.2mm; can hardly see it at all. 0.025mm (25 nanometer) goes from lungs directly into the blood stream.
They are finding plastic not just in blood but inside the cells themselves.
Would be useful to use proper terms so I know my air filter c
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I understand what you're saying and also feel the same as you about the prefix use.
But 'micro' comes from the Greek 'mykros' which means simply 'small' and sometimes people use it loosely, like in 'microtransactions'.
Re:Synthetic clothes (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder how much this stuff actually affects us. It's been around for several generations, and you'd think some health effects would have manifested by now. Declining fertility could be one of them, but I'm not aware of other aspects of health that have deteriorated in the past 80 years or so.
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking not only water in but wastewater, there must be huge amounts from washing machines. Yes, the lack of large specific observable harm is the one comforting thought I have on this, I'm just not convinced it will stay that way.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks!
Re:Synthetic clothes (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I can not prove it, but I am 100% blaming microplastics.
That's just the brain cancer talking. How do you know it's microplastics, rather than say PFAS, air pollution, or the many other things that cause problems?
I'm not saying it's *not* microplastics, I'm saying use what is left of your brain to think instead of passing judgement.
Re:Synthetic clothes (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Better nutrition, perhaps more caloric food would be the main suspect - it's been known to be one of the main factors in the onset of puberty. But who knows what other factors are there, human body is a crazy complicated system where things can be linked in most unexpected ways
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
One terrifying change that for some reason is not really covered at all in the media: children are starting puberty younger, especially girls.
I don't know what planet you are on, but this has been discussed endlessly. It is because of hormones being used in meat production.
Re: (Score:2)
And milk production. And that's been discussed around the part of the country I live in for at least the last 35 years, because girls develop very early here.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know what planet you are on, but this has been discussed endlessly. It is because of hormones being used in meat production.
I'm afraid there are some inconvenient facts with that theory, not least of which is that it fails to explain why the trend began over a century before those hormones saw widespread use [nih.gov].
The average age for menarche (a girl's first menstruation) has been declining by about 4 months every decade since at least the mid-1800s. That global trend remains the case today, with better nutrition and the rise in childhood obesity being the leading theories. Given that we didn't have the technology to manufacture rBST/
Re:Synthetic clothes (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how much this stuff actually affects us. It's been around for several generations, and you'd think some health effects would have manifested by now. Declining fertility could be one of them, but I'm not aware of other aspects of health that have deteriorated in the past 80 years or so.
It hasnt really be that long though. Bakelite and stuff have been around for several generations, but as far as most modern plastics go the boomers were teenagers before they really encountered them in everyday life, and even then they were not in a world completely with plastic waste that breaks down into micro plastics until some time much later. Later Xers and possibly even the earlier millennials were probably first people who grew up in a plastic world from the start. Lots of things are harmful to immature organisms that have little impact on adults. We are only now seeing now the health of these groups in later life.
Re: Synthetic clothes (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Metabolic syndrome?
Type 2 diabetes?
Sperm counts in men?
Overall fertility?
Seems like the labcoats need to gather up some mice and see what happens when you feed half a microplastics-free American diet.
Re: (Score:3)
and you'd think some health effects would have manifested by now.
Every time someone does a trend analysis half of the internet shouts back angrily "CORRELAITON IS NOT CAUSATION" while frothing angrily at the mouth. Proving causation is hard when the mechanisms by which something may affect something else are not known. We have a lot of health effects in general among populations that currently are not tagged to any specific cause.
Right now there's many toxicological studies underway, some of them even showing evidence of metabolic disorder (which is funny because you'll
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds right (obviously it's wrong, but you get what I'm saying). Polyester is a common plastic (PET bottles etc) and in garments like fleece, the latter I believe goes out with the water from washing in huge amounts.
Re: Synthetic clothes (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't know much about tyres other then a couple of years ago at least, I was talking to a someone who did street racing and they imported tyres from the US as here in the EU there was much stricter regulations as to what oils are used to produce them making them more expensive even if shipping those massive tyres wasn't cheap.
Re: (Score:2)
Just get you a buffalo coat. Or a sheepskin with the wool on it. Yes, fleece in particular are good insulators because of the tiny fibers of extruded plastic they're made up of. Also, that's why they're soft. Real sheepskin jackets cost a fortune, but they're really warm. Of course, unlike fleece you cannot machine wash them.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the thing, it's just so cheap and convenient in comparison. Merino wool would replace most items for me, but that's also hand wash. Jacket I'd probably go for down. For shoes I don't think there's a realistic alternative but leather and socks. Just replacing what I have and actually use would be in the $1000s, have me hand wash and looking at the whole do jack shit.
Re: (Score:2)
You just need to go out and hunt and wear polar bear skin or something like that. I saw a program a long time ago about some folks visiting indigenous tribes in the Arctic. The visitors said they were not comfortable wearing synthetics but the natives were fine who wore animal skin. Maybe they're just used to the environment?
Ages of man (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
iron age,
bronze age,
silver age,
gold age,
and now for us, the plastic age
Ahhh, the plastic age. One comedian's answer to one of our oldest questions:
"The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn
Re: (Score:2)
ok the nitpickers will say fossil fuel since it's mostly natural gas.
How Interesting (Score:3)
Over the centuries of discourse about the possible likely cause of the end of the human species....we've focused on war, plague, asteroid impacts, the Second Coming, acid raid, global starvation, water wars, nuclear holocaust, fission gone wild, our solar system's sun ...
How completely anticlimactic would it be if we just ... fizzle out due to global plastic contamination.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: How Interesting (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
this is the real grey goo theory
Shouldnâ(TM)t be here, end of discussion (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
After replacing a water heater I wanted to keep the old tank and upcycle it into a planter or something, holy crap that spray foam they use gets everywhere - I probably breathed more of that in than any other plastic in the past decade. Thanks to static electricity the stuff just sticks to everything.
This explains a few things... (Score:2)
...but mainly why people are less and less able to think realistically. Like, maybe plastic tricks the brain into thinking that opinions are facts.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Should they be called milliplastics? (Score:3)
Humans are exposed to microplastics – defined as fragments smaller than 5mm in diameter...
So.. perhaps milliplastics is a better term? Or better yet, why not define a more appropriate size threshold? /S ffs
Besides, a ~5mm chunk (bullet) of plastic lodged in brain tissue is likely fatal. A minor amount of severe apple=jump type brain damage at the very least.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Besides, a ~5mm chunk (bullet) of plastic lodged in brain tissue is likely fatal.
Why would it be fatal? I work with a person who had 1/4 of his brain removed in an accident. Aside from motor skill issues he's actually an excellent engineer. Doctors regularly find big objects in people's brain.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm thinking nanoplastics is a better term. How are they defining "microplastics"? It seems that they are finding them inside everything, including rocks millions of years old, on Mars, in my spaghetti, and in the orange on my desk. If that's true then they are probably a natural occurrence and have nothing to do with modern plastics.
ok so stop (Score:2)
...using tires and synthetic textiles.
There: basically 2/3 of micro plastics removed from the stream.
Read the author list (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why? Do you think North America is somehow different from China and the effects of plastic? Considering all the plastic bottles and bags I see lying along the side of the road, any potential differences would be insignificant.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't recycle plastic (Score:3)
Shoulda stuck with... (Score:2)
Plastic Man (Score:2)
it's lint (Score:3)
Synthetic fabrics are constantly shedding microplastics according to the internet. So those super-soft pseudo-fur fleece and other micro-extruded polyester products need to stop doing that. I'm a sailor, so I have microplastics shedding from huge Dacron (polyester) sails and all the sheets and halyards (ultra-high-molecular-weight woven polyethylene with woven polyester jackets), plus from the (polyester resin infused) glass fiber boat decks and hulls and (polyester) gel-coated surfaces.
Probably 90% of us are wearing some synthetic clothing, whether it be a blend or full synthetic made from dinosaur hydrocarbons or recycled PET bottles.
If I make a plant-based plastic, say out of epoxidized linseed oil, does that product then accumulate in the environment and cause problems?
0.001%s Don't Fret (Score:2)
I use my bitcoin hoard to remain free of all plastics.
I would imagine ... (Score:2)
... that there are bits of just about anything super small, in the environment, in our tissues.
The important question is whether any given substance, in the concentration it's actually found in, is actually dangerous enough to be worried about. And that's the part where they start mumbling and hand waving/.
Five Millimeters ??? (Score:2)
Humans are exposed to microplastics -- defined as fragments smaller than 5mm in diameter
OK, unless it's too early in the morning, that's half a centimetre.
That's a big chunk! One like that would cause real problems.
These are 'milliplastics', actually.
Or maybe the reporter was a doofus, and meant 'less than five micrometres'.
Or American.
Re: Microplastics in the brain and MAGA (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Microplastics in the brain and MAGA (Score:1)
(/Trump mode)
Re: (Score:2)
You are an ugly anonymous coward posting fake news from your mom's basement.
Do you seriously want the real news from his mom's basement? Count your blessings!
Re: Microplastics in the brain and MAGA (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re: Microplastics in the brain and MAGA (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Bad example. Or maybe a good example, because it shows the attitude of many people who take a very partisan view of politics. But politics is not a game, or sport. Reasons for picking a favourite sports team are not rational and they don't need to be, I'd even say aren't meant to be. However, politics is too important to be treated like a game. Politicians you elect will make laws that will affect your life in very direct and very significant ways. Many people's lives have been completely screwed over by po
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Trump's own staffer just said at the convention that he refers to his own MAGA supporters as basement dwellers.
Re: (Score:2)
"Can't be coincidence."
Is that right? Cannot be? Perhaps you should rethink that, with what's left of your plasticized brain.
Re: Microplastics in the brain and MAGA (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Can't possibly be true. Everyone knows increased brain plasticity is a good thing
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re: Microplastics in the brain and MAGA (Score:2)
Fascist-populism is very easy on the brain. No gray area to weigh when you can hand all the decision making to the strongest guy you see.
Re: Microplastics in the brain and MAGA (Score:2)
Lucky us, if they did it the same way as Hitler's group, Kamala would not stand a chance. World war 3 avoided... for now. Ugh, would not be surprised if one day a psychiatrist discovers abrain deficiency in extreme right wingers. Some
Re: (Score:2)
Came here to post the same. Can't be coincidence.
No, see, microplastics compels people to bring up political discussions at every given opportunity. Family gatherings, Thanksgiving dinner, YouTube comments, even right here on Slashdot! They just can't help it, it's the plastic. It's like a tiny little Goa'uld parasite whispering in your mind "try to make this discussion about politics..."
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Microplastics in the brain would also explain socialists and certainly The Giggler.
(that's Harris if you are behind on your memes)
Re: (Score:2)
Of course! everything was just rainbows and fkin unicorns until Trump showed up. Then SUDDENLY, OUT OF GODDAMN NOWHERE, America now has HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of bloody SATAN-FASCISTS! Yeeees!
Can I get a HALELUJAH!?
Srsly, however, it's almost as if the Dems are that much worse than Trump, and that is why so many Americans support him...
Re: (Score:2)