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Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

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Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#191

Post by gnabgib »

gus_massa wrote: post #190
sarchertech wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here in Argentina we approved the Sputnik vaccine. It was approved only here and in Russia. And here it was approved not by the standard office (ANMAT), but by a special resolution of the Health Ministry.

We could find it in Canada too (due to distribution it wasn't super common)

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#192

Post by refulgentis »

timr wrote: post #175
refulgentis wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but: > "You found a paper" johnbarron didn't find it. The authors cited it as foundational to their own work. it's ref. 38 in the paper under discussion. From the paper: "this finding had not been reported in the MP literature until 2020, when Witzig et al. reported that laboratory gloves submerged in water leached residues that were misidentified as polyethylene."[1] > "most of these plastic studies are [not…

> This is like saying "miles per gallon" when discussing weight. "nanomolar detection levels"...microplastics are individual particles identified by spectroscopy, reported as particles per mm^2. "Nanomolar" is a dissolved-species concentration unit. It has nothing to do with particle counting. (I, and other laymen, understand what you mean but you go on later in the thread to justify your unsourced and unjustified cl…

> ...

"1 nanomole of polyethylene" requires you to pick an arbitrary average molecular weight.

This changes the answer by orders of magnitude depending on what you pick.

Which is why nobody does it.

> Relatively little quantitative science in this area depends on counting plastic particles in microscopic images...Many others use methods that depend on gas chromatography or NMR.

So we're dismissive of some subset of papers, because they get false positives using toy methods.

Real science would use gas chromatography.

But...the paper we're dismissing tested gas chromatography. And found the same false positive. [1, in abstract]

> A relatively infamous recent example used pyrolysis GCMS to make low-concentration measurements (hence: nanomolar)

The brain study I'm guessing you are referring to, [2], measured low concentrations, yes.

But it reported them in ug/g.

Because polymers don't have a defined molecular weight.

> made idiotic claims about plastic spoons in brains

The brain study I'm guessing you are referring to, [2], does not mention spoons, or, come close.

Are we sure there's a paper that did that?

[1] Witzig et al, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c03742, "Therefore, u-Raman, u-FTIR, and pyr-GC/MS were further tested for their capability to distinguish among PE, sodium dodecyl sulfate, and stearates. It became clear that stearates and sodium dodecyl sulfates can cause substantial overestimation of PE."

[2] Campen et al, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38765967/, "Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains"

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#193

Post by johnbarron »

timr wrote: post #101
johnbarron wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I'm amazed that wasn't taken into account! This was taken into account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563392

You found a paper saying that contamination is possible. That doesn’t mean that most of these plastic studies are doing the necessary controls, let alone the (almost impossible) task of preventing the contamination in a laboratory setting where nanomolar detection levels are used to make broad claims.

>> That doesn’t mean that most of these plastic studies are doing the necessary controls

That was never my argument. Read it again.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#194

Post by gus_massa »

estearum wrote: post #149
gus_massa wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But science is about doing your own research! The idea is that science results are based on evidence that is published in serious [1] peer review [2] journals. At some time you realize you can't repeat all the test at home, because it would be full of mice and transgenic plants and a huge particle collider and ... Also, there are a lot of very hard topics. So you must trust the system, but not too much. * Big pharma…

This is all a very fun thought experiment and whatnot but the reality is the COVID vaccines went through gigantic randomized controlled trials, our absolute best known method (by a gigantic margin) to figure out what is true. Those trials unequivocally showed extremely high effectiveness and extremely high safety. The people who say otherwise are simply wrong in this case. No matter how much philosophizing you or the…

>> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.

If you want to ruin your day, take a look at the hydroxychloroquine [retracted] paper by Raoult. Who is the control group? Why was it reported in the press as a 100% cure if the only death was in the trial group?

I agree that the trial to prove the effectiveness and safety of the covid-19 vaccines were much better designed. One of the reasons is that to get the approval of the FDA they must dot the i and j and cross the t and f.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#195

Post by cowsandmilk »

EPWN3D wrote: post #161

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 ov…

> Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying.

What great pains are they going through? The study is a discussion of measurement techniques and makes no comment on whether they are harmful because that’s irrelevant to the paper.

This could just as easily be a paper on how wearing the wrong type of gloves results in overestimating calcium in soil. You’re the one injecting a political agenda.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#196

Post by sumea »

firesteelrain wrote: post #59
dust42 wrote: post #52

So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear means we get an extra dose of micro plastics? Yikes.

It says similar. “ Stearates are salts, or soap-like particles. Manufacturers coat disposable gloves with stearates to make them easier to peel from the molds used to form them. But stearates are also chemically very similar to some microplastics, according to the researchers, and can lead to false positives when researchers are looking for microplastic pollution.” Stearates aren’t microplastics. Maybe we need to be…

Stearates are considered very safe chemical compounds. They are derived from stearic acid which is one of the most common fatty acids and metal ions such as sodium and magnesium. Sodium stearate is a common soap and magnesium stearate is one of the most common additives in pharmaceuticals. This means that they are practically everywhere and but also easily digested in small amounts.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#197

Post by zahlman »

eigenspace wrote: post #163
EPWN3D wrote: post #161

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 ov…

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…

> and part of that humility should involve being cautious about introducing them to our bodies and environment.

What does that look like today, pragmatically speaking?

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#199

Post by peyton »

refulgentis wrote: post #152
david-gpu wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spiritual equivalent of a life sciences forum discovering memory safety, one person who wrote code for a bit saying they wrote a memory bug in C once, then someone clutching pearls about why programmers irresponsibly write memory unsafe code given it has a global impact. I used to be a code monkey, I wrote systems software at megacorps, and still can't understand why so many programmers irresponsibly write memory u…

That's the analogy working as intended: the answer to "why do programmers still write memory-unsafe code" is the same shape as "why do microplastics researchers still wear gloves." The real answer is boring and full of tradeoffs. The HN thread version skips to indignation: "they never thought of contamination so ipso facto all the research is suspect" (to go a bit further, in case it's confusing: both you and I agree…

You’re ignoring the article to grind your axe.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#200

Post by calibas »

Barbing wrote: post #173
EPWN3D wrote: post #161

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 ov…

I’ll breathe tires a little easier today :) Hey remember what happened with BPA? That was frustrating. We saw ostensibly legitimate concern, then manufacturers telling us they got rid of it. Maybe it would’ve inspired confidence if the removal adverts came with data sheets on the replacement chemicals.

It was largely replaced with it's molecular analog, BPS.

Just like BPA, BPS is an endocrine disruptor. The idea that it's less harmful than BPA is mostly due to lack of research.

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