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wolfcede t1_je5n855 wrote

There’s been lots of talk about micro plastics being of measurable quantity in the human body. Do we have a more precise instrument recently for observing these micro plastics or was this known before and just not widely discussed? Is it a new blood test? What’s the instrumentation needed to observe this phenomenon and how accurate is it? Is it possible that plastic is being stored in parts of the body other than blood that we still can’t observe accurately?

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Indemnity4 t1_je89ood wrote

The new blood test is an old test that has been used for environmental monitoring, but not human blood. The neat part of the study was separating the plastics from the blood.

There is no useful measurement for microplastics inside the human body.

For instance, they are mostly inside your gut and lungs. Currently, to measure microplastic exposure involves taking your poop dissolving it and separating out the tiny pieces of plastic from all the food stuff. Not easy to do, but also not very useful information.

We think you have about 100,000 plastic microparticles enter your body everyday. The plastic particles are only about 4% of all the total microparticles per day you are exposed to, the rest mostly being "natural" particles of things like fine sand, dirt, biological materials etc.

When you die, we think about only 1000 will be inside your body. That is from autopsies, so not a lot of information but even order of magnitude it is <<< than your daily microparticle intake. They may be stuck in lesions in your lungs or little blister-things in your gut. Maybe some have crossed the gut to get stuck in some organs. But vast 99.999+% just pass through you like ghosts through a wall.

Everything else - we don't know. We don't know if they are neutral guests along for a ride and doing nothing, if they do anything "good" or anything "bad", if they are correlated with anything. That's an important question: the old prove it doesn't hurt me versus prove it is safe. There are lots of natural things we haven't proved are safe, but we also haven't found anything harmful either.

The conclusion of the linked article is keen to point out that they don't know if the particles are floating in your blood or carried inside cells. They don't know the fate of the particles. They have no way to link blood numbers to any sort of health outcomes or even to ongoing monitoring.

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