Scientists express concern over health impacts, with another study finding particles in arteries
Microplastics have been found in every human placenta tested in a study, leaving the researchers worried about the potential health impacts on developing foetuses.
The scientists analysed 62 placental tissue samples and found the most common plastic detected was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. A second study revealed microplastics in all 17 human arteries tested and suggested the particles may be linked to clogging of the blood vessels.
Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood 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. The particles could lodge in tissue and cause inflammation, as air pollution particles do, or chemicals in the plastics could cause harm.
Huge 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, and they have been found in the faeces of babies and adults.
It is crazy that it has become this much of a problem and it feels like it is on almost no one’s radar. Is this even reversible at this point? I assume not, but that it can definitely get worse.
Good news, it is! Unlike other bad stuff like heavy metals, microplastics and PFAS are naturally eliminated from the body, just very slowly. Procedures like dialysis, or even just giving blood, can remove them more quickly.
do you have any references to this and their methodology?
For which part? I can link some studies, but you’d probably be more satisfied with the results you get by searching on your own.
mainly curious about the dialysis. i feel the passive elimination would vary based on demographic, intake, diet etc. i guess you would just need something semipermeable that traps the plastics. trapping plastic with plastic
Well now I can’t find whatever I was looking at that said it was effective. But I did find this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666821123000868
Obviously, hydrogen peroxide would not be a good idea in hemodialysis, but some of the other reactants might be useful.
Since microplastics are a bit larger than blood cells (plastics 10-50um vs white blood cells 12-15 and red 7.5-8.7um) theoretically they could be filtered by a 15um water filter to get most of them.
So giving blood doesn’t really remove the micro plastics so much as transfer them to someone else who is in rven worse shape than you are
Yeah but them needing blood is a bigger problem than having microplastics.
Also if it’s replacing blood lost, then they’ll probably break even on microplastics content.
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Here’s an article from 2020 about micro plastics being a carcinogen https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304389420309833
Here’s another that goes over individual chemicals that may leech out of them https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7068600/
That’s just a few things from a search. There are already known impacts and we understand the mechanisms.
I want to begin by saying I am not dismissing concerns about microplastics in placentas. That’s fucked up.
However, lots of things “are carcinogens”. It’s the dose that makes the poison.
Yeah, and carcinogens typically screw with DNA. So even a tiny dose will cause greater impacts on a fetus both as a greater concentration than the same dose would be for an adult and as damage to DNA will replicate exponentially more times than they would in an adult.
