OPINION:
Unless your brain filters out news about popular science, you’ve heard that researchers have detected the tiniest particles of plastic ever found in the world around us. They’re so small, the story goes, that the human body’s normal sieve can’t strain them out of your organs.
This sounds horrible, but it’s mostly wrong — because news outlets hire science reporters who wouldn’t make good scientists. NPR took the gold medal last month with a headline that warned about “a massive number of plastic particles in bottled water.”
Americans have been fooled again by the “everything will kill you” crowd.
Imagine that your favorite podcaster proclaimed that scientists had detected smaller particles of dangerous dust than ever before — tiny bits of airborne flotsam so small that the most expensive air filters cannot keep them out of the air you breathe at home.
In the real world, microscopic bits of everything are unavoidable. Physicists estimate that roughly 100 metric tons of cosmic dust enters Earth’s atmosphere every day. We are continually and unknowingly breathing these nano-meteorites into our lungs with no consequence. About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through our bodies every second, and no one writes headlines about it.
The researchers who started the latest nano particle panic said more than half of the floating plastic they identified is found in many of the filters used to make water safer.
Jumping on the bandwagon is a group called the Ocean Conservancy, which is warning about microplastics in just about every form of protein we eat. That includes beef, chicken, pork and seafood. Tofu and other plant-based protein, too. Unless you want weaker bones and a compromised immune system, protein must stay on the menu.
The good news is that the human body is remarkably good at filtering out and removing tiny alien particles that invade nearly every organ we have. Is there any human health danger at all? Rutgers toxicologist Phoebe Stapleton, who co-authored the latest nanoplastics study, says the question is “currently under review.” If that crucial quote is in your news feed at all, it’s buried somewhere around paragraph 26. And no matter how tiny nanoplastics are, what matters most is whether they’re toxic.
A group of German scientists, it turns out, answered the question four years ago. After testing all the nanoplastics we encounter in daily life, they concluded that “none of the particles triggered acute toxic effects.” And the only health risk might be from “excessively high concentrations far beyond realistic dietary exposure of consumers.”
Conversely, if you need a new health scare, ultrafine airborne particles from gasoline and candles have been identified to cause inflammation in lung tissue. And while plastic dust is not associated with lung disease, particles of asbestos, silica and even cotton have been implicated in causing airway constriction.
Yet another identified harm in the nano size category is aluminum. There’s a growing commercial market for aluminum nanoparticles. Some scientists are learning to depth-charge our bloodstreams with them as drug-delivery devices. Others are working on using nano-aluminum to increase the effectiveness of vaccines. Geologists call aluminum an “everywhere” metal, and it looks like they’re right.
Harmful? Deadly? That too, is “currently under review.” There is growing evidence that aluminum may contribute to adult dementia. When pathologists dissect an Alzheimer’s disease patient’s brain after death, large deposits of aluminum nearly always turn up in the parts of the organ that have wasted away. Researchers warned a year ago in the journal Neurological Research about the “memory impairing effect of aluminum nanoparticles.”
Now that could be worth actual hand-wringing. The companies that make aluminum cans know it. And ironically, nearly all of them spray the insides of their cans with plastic.
• Rick Berman is president of RBB Strategies and is on the board of the RAM Veterans Foundation.
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