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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

#81

Post by NiloCK »

SapporoChris wrote: post #66
sfn42 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not aware of any reason to worry about micro plastics. As far as I know they seem harmless?

It is true that there is not currently conclusive proof that micro plastics are a significant risk to human health. However, this is the same line the tobacco industry used for decades even though they knew different.

Is there any specific evidence that they are a risk to human health?

I mean, I get the instinct that foreign-entity can't exactly be good for me, but the same instinct applied to GMOs, and as far as I know organic foods have never yielded any sort of statistically visible health impacts.

Plastics earn their keep in general by being non-reactive and 'durable', so it's not entirely shocking if they can pass through (or hang around inside) the body without engaging in a lot of biochemical activity.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#82

Post by ivell »

greenavocado wrote: post #56
ivell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is partially correct. Except make sure you have the necessary skills to question the science. Intuition in these things are quite misleading. Don't start questioning cancer reports just because you don't feel sick.If you really don't trust it, get a relevant medical degree or take second opinions from those who are really qualified and not some quacks. Otherwise you would just end up dead.

The problem with your claim that the plebs are incapable of research because they don't have equipment and are dumb is the wholesale erosion of belief in institutions after the COVID "vaccine" situation

I assume you are expert in some domain. How would you feel if someone who is not familiar with your domain comes in and start questioning your expert judgment? Even in your domain probably being an expert means having access and expertise of equipments. Without that I cannot imagine having expertise to judge what is correct and what is wrong for that domain.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#83

Post by Snoozus »

pton_xd wrote: post #80
throwup238 wrote: post #9

Called it! > To be honest, after reading some of these microplastics papers I'm starting to suspect most of them are bullshit. Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cl…

> Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers. Maybe so, but plastics are also everywhere in our…

You would, but if you do studies that claim that microplastics accumulate in our bodies or even in out brains it makes a difference.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#84

Post by schiffern »

sfn42 wrote: post #63
firesteelrain wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm still not aware of any reason to worry about micro plastics. As far as I know they seem harmless?

The problem isn't just the plastics themselves. Plastics are chemical "sponges" that will soak up pollutants over time from the environment (brominated fire retardants, bisphenols, PBCs, pesticides, phthalates, heavy metals, etc) and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.

Even if plastics of all sizes are 100% biologically inert, they're still a Trojan Horse for other toxins.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942...

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Verla-Wirnkor-2/publica...

Roughly 50% of indoor dust is composed of microplastics, so it's not like it's uncommon.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#86

Post by johnbarron »

A rediscovery...six years later:

"When Good Intentions Go Bad — False Positive Microplastic Detection Caused by Disposable Gloves" - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c03742

From the study in the OP you cannot derive that current studies on microplastics are not valid. The headline framing that scientists have been measuring their own gloves, is science journalism doing what it does best...

Stearates are water soluble soaps, so any study using standard wet chemistry extraction, and that is most of them, washes them away before analysis even begins. Stearates also cant mimic polystyrene, PET, PVC, nylon, or any of the dozens of other polymers routinely found in environmental and human tissue samples.

Nothing to see here.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#87

Post by johnbarron »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #55

I'm amazed that wasn't taken into account! Many years ago, in the final year of my Biology degree, I did a paid summer internship at an Evolutionary Biology lab here in Spain, assisting in a project where they were researching relationships between metal ion accumulation (mostly zinc) and certain SNPs (≈"gene varieties"). A lot of my work was in slicing tiny fragments of deep-frozen human livers and kidneys in a bios…

>> I'm amazed that wasn't taken into account!

This was taken into account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563392

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#89

Post by Lerc »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #73
alsetmusic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incredible. Though the effect of this will be claims that microplastics don't exist while no one in that case claimed that murders didn't happen. Happy to have learned about an interesting historical oddity either way.

I don't think anyone will claim microplastics don't exist, but people will definitely be skeptical of articles about how many there, and where they're found. At worst, I'd expect to see people disregarding the threat, not disregarding the presence of the microplastics themselves.

I'm not sure if they have established a threat. I thought it was mostly hypothesised or very locally specific harms.

On the other hand I suspect much of the real science on environmental plastic might avoid the term microplastic since it seems to have a meaning that flows to whatever can make the scariest headline today. I have seen the size range to qualify run from microscopic up to a couple of millimetres. Volumes, quantities, or location stated without regard to individual particle size. I'm relatively certain that they have not discovered 1mm particles inside red blood cells.

Even what counts as a plastic seems to be an easy way of adding vagueness, I saw one table that seemed to count cellulose as a plastic, which makes sense if you are thinking about properties of the material, but unsurprisingly easy to come across that it's not really worth going looking for it.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#90

Post by Lerc »

SapporoChris wrote: post #66
sfn42 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not aware of any reason to worry about micro plastics. As far as I know they seem harmless?

It is true that there is not currently conclusive proof that micro plastics are a significant risk to human health. However, this is the same line the tobacco industry used for decades even though they knew different.

And indeed there is not currently conclusive proof that WiFi is a significant risk to human health. However, this is the same line the tobacco industry used for decades even though they knew different.
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