HIGH-DEGREE SLOP

We all know plastic pollution is ubiquitous, present in the soil, water, and air and thus in our food, too. At minimum it’s gross and all this plastic seems to be disgustingly persistent in the environment. But all over the place and for many years now we’ve been hearing that the situation is far worse than we imagined. Microplastics! Those petroleum-based fragments, and their infinitesimal, nano off-spring, appeared to be far more problematic than a wayward Ziploc bag or pop bottle cap. And yet, though the underlying threat these products (of our products) pose to human health seemed clear, the phenomenon and consequences remained unstudied.

Research was conducted. And it didn’t look good. Studies around the globe found itty-bitty plastics migrating from the environment into people’s blood, arteries, brains, testes, and placentas were published and reported on all across the globe. The documentaries were made, several of them, and toured the world and your favourite streaming sites, too. 

Everyone likes a shocking new study; and no one more than newspaper editors, television producers, podcasters, and social media activists. And this was the kind of scary story the press and other commentators, particularly anyone with a health and or environmental leaning, could not fail to lap up and spread far and wide. It didn’t matter, of course, that review, reproduction, and further study was still pending.

But people eventually did look into these studies and their methods and analysis. It looked like, in the race to publish results, at least in some cases, research teams with limited analytical skills rushed to their conclusions skipping routine scientific checks. In no time, at least seven studies were challenged by peer researchers publishing in respective journals, with findings such as, “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.” 

In public, those same investigators were far less diplomatic, offering on their social media profiles scathing evaluations like:

Scientists don't have time to ask themselves hard questions!

The brain microplastic paper is a joke:

Fat is known to make false-positive for PE - see missing high m/z ions in PyGCMS.

The brain has ~60% fat, and the liver has ~5%, so that is why there are ~10x more "plastics" in the brain.

The same researcher, Dr Dušan Materić, Head of their research group on Microplastics, Nanoplastics and Elements at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, recently told The Guardian: “‘That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.’ He thinks there are serious doubts over ‘more than half of the very high impact papers’ reporting microplastics in biological tissue.” But that wasn’t just a problem plaguing one paper. So far, at least 18 studies have been effectively debunked for failing to consider human biology or background contamination and as such yielding totally unreliable results — and with that unfounded conclusions.

An environmental chemist and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia, Dr Cassandra Rauert, who recently published her work with a team looking into the limits of plastic detection in the blood, explained “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometres can cross into the blood stream.” She says, “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.” So, Rauert tells us, “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans.” But, she is also perfectly clear in noting that our current technology and methods do not allow us to detect nano-size particles.