HIGH-DEGREE SLOP

We all know plastic pollution is ubiquitous, present in the soil, water, and air. At minimum it’s gross and all this plastic seems to be disgustingly persistent in the environment, too. 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 threats to human health posed by these products (of our products) seemed clear, the phenomenon and consequences remained largely unstudied.

Research was eventually conducted. And it didn’t look good. Studies from all around the globe found itty-bitty plastics migrating from the environment into people’s blood, arteries, brains, testes, and placentas. The results were published and reported on everywhere. Soon documentaries were out, several of them, and those 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 or environmental leaning, just could not fail to lap up and spread far and wide. "Your balls are full of plastics!" they blasted, all while connecting this to every disorder and illness out there. Apparently this could potentially, or obviously, explain chronic illness, cancers, auto-immune issues, infertility and more. Diabetes? Autism? 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. And it soon appeared that, 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 like, “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 such as:

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 this particular paper was really bad and that the explaination is simple. They tell us “He thinks there are serious doubts over ‘more than half of the very high impact papers’ reporting microplastics in biological tissue” and that researchers were simply failing to understand their subject matter and the limitations of their methods. At least 18 studies have been effectively debunked for failing to consider human biology and the production of false-positives by the chosen detection technique while others didn't account for background contamination or contamination by latex lab gloves, for instance, and as such yielding totally unreliable results — and with similar unfounded conclusions.

More than that, it looks like we can't yet know what we're hoping to find out. 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.