“The concentrations we saw in the brain tissue of normal individuals, who had an average age of around 45 or 50 years old, were 4,800 micrograms per gram, or 0.48% by weight,” Campen said.
That’s the equivalent of an entire standard plastic spoon, Campen said.
“Compared to autopsy brain samples from 2016, that’s about 50% higher”
An entire spoon’s worth of plastic in ol’ wrinkly. That doesn’t seem good.
As far as we know the plastic is mostly not doing anything and is possibly bioinert (thatd be lucky). We don’t have anybody to compare it to though, because everybody on earth including the uncontacted tribes has a ton of plastic in em cause microplastics are in every environment including just the rain and every plant and every animal. Would I say it’s good to have the equivalent of a plastic spoon in your brain? No, I’d rather not have it there and I’d rather us stop polluting the environment with more microplastics.
I do feel like we lost this struggle, like long term. It’s going to be thousands of years before this stuff starts to break down. We can, hopefully, make it not as bad I guess
Yeah, the silver lining here is that the reason we use plastic for everything (well, the reason beyond “oil stonks go brrrr”) is that it doesn’t really react to much of anything and is about as inert as a substance can be. And as terrible as it sounds, if there was any massively noticeable interaction between microplastics and our nervous system/bloodstream/neurons/cellular activity/etc we’d probably be dropping dead by the thousands everyday already, barring any future realization that this stuff fucks with our brains like lead exposure.
:yea: