How many tiny pieces of plastic are currently inside your body?
A series of headline-grabbing studies in the last few years have claimed to have found microplastics throughout human bodies — inside blood, organs and even brains.
However, some of this research has recently come under stinging criticism from scientists.
Photo: Bloomberg
Some have warned that the studies could not rule out contamination from plastic inside laboratories, or that certain techniques could be confusing human tissue with plastic.
Seeking a solution to this escalating dispute, 30 scientists from 20 research institutions across the world proposed a new framework on Tuesday for evaluating microplastic research.
The proposal, inspired by how forensic science weighs evidence found at crime scenes, offers researchers a consistent way to communicate how confident they are that microplastic has actually been detected.
No one disputes that these mostly invisible pieces of plastic are ubiquitous throughout the environment — they have been found everywhere from the tops of mountains to the bottom of oceans.
It is also “very likely” that we are regularly ingesting microplastics from air and food, Imperial College London researcher Leon Barron said.
But there is simply not enough evidence yet to say whether they are bad for our health, added the senior author of the new proposal.
INSIDE OUR BRAINS?
Microplastics — and even smaller nanoplastics — are very difficult to detect.
Yet some research in this new and rapidly expanding field has claimed to have found particles in “less-plausible” areas of the human body, Barron explained.
For example, a study published in Nature Medicine early last year announced it had detected relatively large particles inside the brains of recently deceased people.
Some scientists were skeptical because this would require the particles to cross the powerful defenses of the blood-brain barrier.
Experts have also pointed out that the technique used in this study and several others, which is called pyrolysis-GC-MS, can confuse fat with polyethylene, which is commonly used in plastic packaging. In February last year, CNN reported that the study’s senior author, Matthew Campen of the University of New Mexico, had said the amount of plastic found in a brain sample was equivalent to a plastic spoon.
However Campen said on Tuesday that “the concept of a ‘plastic spoon’ is a media invention.”
“The biggest issue was extrapolation of a single sample of the brain to the entire brain, which we are now establishing was a meaningful overestimation,” he added.
He also welcomed the “groundswell of interest” in the subject and said he looked forward to research that “will provide greater confidence and accuracy in micro and nanoplastics measurements.”
Other research has been disparaged for not using proper quality-control measures.
Without these measures, “it is impossible to know whether detected plastics originate from the tissue itself or from containers, chemicals, laboratory equipment or plastic particles present in the air,” researcher Dusan Materic said.
This would mean the results are “simply not scientific”, said the expert at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany.
INSPIRED BY FORENSIC SCIENCE
The new framework proposal, published in the journal Environment & Health, calls for researchers to use several different techniques when looking for microplastics to rule out any potential false positives.
Barron compared the proposal to a framework once agreed among forensic scientists about how to evaluate fibers found in clothes during a criminal investigation.
The idea is to bring “all of the different labs doing this type of work into an aligned language” that expresses how confident they are that they detected microplastic, he said.
The idea is already “starting to gain momentum”, he added.
The proposal requires scientists and journal articles to be transparent about their research, release all the raw data and include quality-control measures.
“To be clear, microplastics are a problem,” Barron emphasized.
All the research conducted thus far has been carried out in good faith, he said, adding that these are relatively normal growing pains for a new scientific field.
But precision is important — to determine whether microplastics are harmful for our health, researchers need to know just how much of them is in our bodies.
If the ongoing scientific debate “derails that effort to try and understand if they’re bad for us, that’s not helpful”, he said.
Campen said that rather than a debate, “what we are seeing is the scientific method.”
“The challenges of detecting and quantifying nanoplastics — shards of plastic the size of viruses — demand intense attention, innovation, as well as scrutiny,” he added.
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
For many people, Bilingual Nation 2030 begins and ends in the classroom. Since the policy was launched in 2018, the debate has centered on students, teachers and the pressure placed on schools. Yet the policy was never solely about English education. The government’s official plan also calls for bilingualization in Taiwan’s government services, laws and regulations, and living environment. The goal is to make Taiwan more inclusive and accessible to international enterprises and talent and better prepared for global economic and trade conditions. After eight years, that grand vision is due for a pulse check. RULES THAT CAN BE READ For Harper Chen (陳虹宇), an adviser
Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years.
President William Lai (賴清德) on Nov. 25 last year announced in a Washington Post op-ed that “my government will introduce a historic US$40 billion supplementary defense budget, an investment that underscores our commitment to defending Taiwan’s democracy.” Lai promised “significant new arms acquisitions from the United States” and to “invest in cutting-edge technologies and expand Taiwan’s defense industrial base,” to “bolster deterrence by inserting greater costs and uncertainties into Beijing’s decision-making on the use of force.” Announcing it in the Washington Post was a strategic gamble, both geopolitically and domestically, with Taiwan’s international credibility at stake. But Lai’s message was exactly
RSS