Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

The various "OMG MICROPLASTICS" studies always smacked of alarmism. No one has actually identified tangible harms from microplastics; it's just taken as a given that they are bad. So this fueled a bunch of studies that tried to find them everywhere. Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying. So I fully expect we'll still be panicking over vague, undefined harm whenever we find microplastics somewhere.

This type of research requires very little creativity or study design -- just throw a dart in a room and try and find microplastics in whatever it lands on. Boom, you get a grant for your study, and journalists will cover your result because it gets clicks. Whenever this type of incentive exists, we should be very skeptical of a rapidly-emerging consensus.

So, I think that while it's true that we haven't really demonstrated any tangible harms of microplastics, and there is a lot of alarmism around it, I think the concern is more rational than it might appear.

If it's true that microplastics are everywhere and in everything (which maybe that's now not actually the case), even a very small chance that there's some serious harm we're not aware of should be taken extremely seriously, because at this point there's (apparently) no practical way to avoid or get away from them, or to even stop producing them. And since they're such a new phenomenon in these quantities, we haven't really had the time to really drill down and figure out *if* there are longterm negative effects.

IMO, we should be intellectually humble about our lack of knowledge on these microplastics, and part of that humility should involve being cautious about introducing them to our bodies and environment.

To be fair, when the Covid vaccine was being rushed to be approved, I didn’t 100% trust that Trump wouldn’t pressure the FDA to approve without being confident it was safe.

So my standard at the time was that I’d take it if the FDA and at least one other developed country approved it.

The way this study was done makes perfect sense for finding this cross-contamination issue, but does not actually address how microplastics samples are extracted and found in sampling studies.

The below meta-study largely discusses sampling methods and protection from cross contamination so everyone here acting like this one study’s somehow invalidates decades of quality research:

>Due to the wide contamination of the environment with microplastics, including air [29], measures should be taken during sampling to reduce the contamination with these particles and fibers. The five rules to reduce cross-contamination of microplastic samples are: (1) using glass and metal equipment instead of plastics, which can introduce contamination; (2) avoiding the use of synthetic textiles during sampling or sample handling, preferring the use of 100% cotton lab coat; (3) cleaning the surfaces with 70% ethanol and paper towels, washing the equipment with acid followed by ultrapure water, using consumables directly from packaging and filtering all working solutions; (4) using open petri dishes, procedural blanks and replicates to control for airborne contamination; (5) keeping samples covered as much as possible and handling them in clean rooms with controlled air circulation, limited access (e.g. doors and windows closed) and limited circulation, preferentially in a fume hood or algae-culturing unit, or by covering the equipment during handling [15], [26], [95], [105], [107]. A fume hood can reduce 50% of the contamination [105] while covering samples during filtration, digestion and visual identification can reduce more than 90% of contamination [95].

So don’t ghost ride the whip about the death of the microplastic plague just yet.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016599361...

Uh, yeah. I know what the word means. See my response to the other comment where you say the same thing.