https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/09/27/news/did-you-know-baby-poo-loaded-microplastics
[images and links in online article]
Did you know baby poo is loaded with microplastics?
By Matt Simon | News | September 27th 2021
Whenever a plastic bag or bottle degrades, it breaks into ever smaller
pieces that work their way into nooks in the environment.
When you wash synthetic fabrics, tiny plastic fibres break loose and
flow out to sea. When you drive, plastic bits fly off your tires and
brakes. That’s why literally everywhere scientists look, they’re finding
microplastics — specks of synthetic material that measure less than five
millimetres long. They’re on the most remote mountaintops and in the
deepest oceans. They’re blowing vast distances in the wind to sully
once-pristine regions like the Arctic. In 11 protected areas in the
western U.S., the equivalent of 120 million ground-up plastic bottles
are falling out of the sky each year.
And now, microplastics are coming out of babies. In a recently published
pilot study, scientists describe sifting through infants’ dirty diapers
and finding an average of 36,000 nanograms of polyethylene terephthalate
(PET) per gram of feces, 10 times the amount they found in adult feces.
They even found it in newborns' first feces. PET is an extremely common
polymer that’s known as polyester when it’s used in clothing, and it is
also used to make plastic bottles. The finding comes a year after
another team of researchers calculated that preparing hot formula in
plastic bottles severely erodes the material, which could dose babies
with several million microplastic particles a day, and perhaps nearly a
billion a year.
Although adults are bigger, scientists think that in some ways infants
have more exposure. In addition to drinking from bottles, babies could
be ingesting microplastics in a dizzying number of ways. They have a
habit of putting everything in their mouths — plastic toys of all kinds,
but they’ll also chew on fabrics. (Microplastics that shed from
synthetic textiles are known more specifically as microfibres, but
they’re plastic all the same.) Babies’ foods are wrapped in single-use
plastics. Children drink from plastic sippy cups and eat off plastic
plates. The carpets they crawl on are often made of polyester. Even
hardwood floors are coated in polymers that shed microplastics. Any of
this could generate tiny particles that children breathe or swallow.
Indoor dust is also emerging as a major route of microplastic exposure,
especially for infants. (In general, indoor air is absolutely lousy with
them; each year you could be inhaling tens of thousands of particles.)
Several studies of indoor spaces have shown that each day in a typical
household, 10,000 microfibres might land on a single square metre of
floor, having flown off of clothing, couches, and bedsheets. Infants
spend a significant amount of their time crawling through the stuff,
agitating the settled fibres and kicking them up into the air.
“Unfortunately, with the modern lifestyle, babies are exposed to so many
different things for which we don't know what kind of effect they can
have later in their life,” says Kurunthachalam Kannan, an environmental
health scientist at New York University School of Medicine and co-author
of the new paper, which appears in the journal Environmental Science and
Technology Letters.
The researchers did their tally by collecting dirty diapers from six
one-year-olds and running the feces through a filter to collect the
microplastics. They did the same with three samples of meconium — a
newborn’s first feces — and stool samples from 10 adults. In addition to
analyzing the samples for PET, they also looked for polycarbonate
plastic, which is used as a lightweight alternative to glass, for
instance in eyeglass lenses. To make sure they only counted the
microplastics that came from the infants’ guts, and not from their
diapers, they ruled out the plastic the diapers were made of:
polypropylene, a polymer that’s distinct from polycarbonate and PET.
All told, PET concentrations were 10 times higher in infants than in
adults, while polycarbonate levels were more even between the two
groups. The researchers found smaller amounts of both polymers in the
meconium, suggesting babies are born with plastics already in their
systems. This echoes previous studies that have found microplastics in
human placentas and meconium.
What this all means for human health — and, more urgently, for infant
health — scientists are now racing to find out. Different varieties of
plastic can contain any of at least 10,000 different chemicals, a
quarter of which are of concern for people, according to a recent study
from researchers at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. These additives serve
all kinds of plastic-making purposes, like providing flexibility, extra
strength, or protection from UV bombardment, which degrades the
material. Microplastics may contain heavy metals like lead, but they
also tend to accumulate heavy metals and other pollutants as they tumble
through the environment. They also readily grow a microbial community of
viruses, bacteria, and fungi, many of which are human pathogens.
Of particular concern are a class of chemicals called
endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, which disrupt hormones and have
been connected to reproductive, neurological, and metabolic problems —
for instance, increased obesity. The infamous plastic ingredient
bisphenol A, or BPA, is one such EDC that has been linked to various
cancers.
“We should be concerned because the EDCs in microplastics have been
shown to be linked with several adverse outcomes in human and animal
studies,” says Jodi Flaws, a reproductive toxicologist at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who led a 2020 study from the Endocrine
Society on plastics. (She wasn’t involved in this new research.)
“Some of the microplastics contain chemicals that can interfere with the
normal function of the endocrine system.”
Infants are especially vulnerable to EDCs, since the development of
their bodies depends on a healthy endocrine system. “I strongly believe
that these chemicals do affect early life stages,” says Kannan. “That's
a vulnerable period.”
This new research adds to a growing body of evidence that babies are
highly exposed to microplastic.
“This is a very interesting paper with some very worrying numbers,” says
University of Strathclyde microplastic researcher Deonie Allen, who
wasn’t involved in the study. “We need to look at everything a child is
exposed to, not just their bottles and toys.”
Since infants are passing microplastics in their feces, that means the
gut could be absorbing some of the particles, like it would absorb
nutrients from food. This is known as translocation: Particularly small
particles might pass through the gut wall and end up in other organs,
including the brain. Researchers have actually demonstrated this in carp
by feeding them plastic particles, which translocated through the gut
and worked their way to the head, where they caused brain damage that
manifested as behavioural problems: Compared to control fish, the ones
with plastic particles in their brains were less active and ate more slowly.
But that was done with very high concentrations of particles and in an
entirely different species. While scientists know that EDCs are bad
news, they don’t yet know what level of microplastic exposure it would
take to cause problems in the human body. “We need many more studies to
confirm the doses and types of chemicals in microplastics that lead to
adverse outcomes,” says Flaws.
In the meantime, microplastics researchers say you can limit children’s
contact with particles. Do not prepare infant formula with hot water in
a plastic bottle — use a glass bottle and transfer it over to the
plastic one once the liquid reaches room temperature. Vacuum and sweep
to keep floors clear of microfibres. Avoid plastic wrappers and
containers when possible. Microplastics have contaminated every aspect
of our lives, so while you’ll never get rid of them, you can at least
reduce your family’s exposure.
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