They found macroplastics in my sample. Plastics so dang macro, they skipped the microscope and put my sample straight in the recycling bin to be sent off and become a 2 liter bottle of Pepsi.
It’s hard to figure out exactly what’s the damage when the contamination is so widespread.
A study to find the effects of the microplastics might be to find some amount of men with microplastics and some without, and follow up with those men overtime to see if the ones without microplastics have less reproductive issues, cancer rates, etc. instead they find everyone is contaminated so there’s no one we can make a comparison to.
Okay sir, this is gonna feel a little cold for a few seconds okay, but it warms up a little. I'm just gonna poke this tube up your urethra. Oh that? That's the ultrasonic creame and we use this wand to direct the energy towards the bad plastics. Not the good plastics, those we don't have to worry about.
Somewhat relevant: I recently stopped using a plastic-bodied electric kettle to boil water for drinks because it was often making drinks taste "of plastic". I have to imagine that some of that would have been redistributed, well, in places implied by this article.
This makes me wonder what regular, close-to-source plastics the tested men were using around the time.
Of course, there's also that a lot of the water supply goes through plastic pipes these days. It would be interesting to know how much of that, specifically, ends up coming out in people's homes.
Recent studies in mice have reported that microplastics reduced sperm count and caused abnormalities and hormone disruption.
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.
“As emerging research increasingly implicates microplastic exposure as a potential factor impacting human health, understanding the extent of human contamination and its relation to reproductive outcomes is imperative,” said Ning Li, of Qingdao University in China, and colleagues.
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.
“If microplastic pollution impacts the critical reproductive process, as evidenced in particular by the decline in seminal quality recorded in recent decades globally, it may prove to be [even worse] for our species in the not too distant future.”
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