Keywords: plastics,
plastic, microplastics, pollution, placenta,
placentas, birth, women, pregnancy, medicine, biology, respiratory system, gastrointestinal
system, lungs, intestine, bloodstream, immune system, lymphatic
system, epithelium, endocytosis
Part 1 is here
Part 2 is here
Part 4 is here
(Read other plastic related stories here & here)
Listen to the podcast episode
on iTunes
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Ascolta l'episodio in italiano
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Ooooh, hello dear English speaking-reading-hearing listener, welcome back to me, @sciencemug, the blog/podcast/twitter&instagram accounts/entity behind the unsuccessful e-shop stuffngo on zazzle.com which tells you science stories while assessing the financial risks of buying seventy-six hundreds tons of pineapples with the idea to resell them to the Italian pizza industry, aaand which talks to you thanks to the voice, kidnapped via a voodoo-wireless trick, from a veeery very very dumb human.
Aaand which does all of this in English-question-mark, a language that is to proper English what Cosmic Sin sf movie is to something even remotely different from a cosmic waste of money aaand a sin committed by the director, screenwriter, producers, cast and film distributors towards the audience, and the gods of storytelling.
Today I’m gonna tell you the third part (the first two are here, and here) of a story about human placentas and plastics!
A group of Italian researchers (aka the Italian Brains, aka the ITBs) study human placentas in search of microplastics fragments (MPs), that is plastic particles smaller than half a centimeter. In doing so, the researchers for the first time ever find such pollutants in the placentas of women in good health and who have had normal pregnancies and deliveries.
The Italian research team is lead by Medical Doctor Antonio Ragusa, Head of the Department of Woman, Mother and Newborn of the San Giovanni Calibíta Fatebenefratelli Hospital, in Rome, and the group publishes its study (P) on the science journal Environment International.
Now, people, so far I’ve told you: how the Italian Brains select the pregnant women for their study, how they design and execute a plastic free protocol to collect the placenta samples, what kind of technique they use to analyze them, aand finally what are the characteristics of the microplastics found in said placenta samples.
In this episode, dear listener, I’m gonna tell you the Italian Brains’ idea of how the darn super-tiny pieces of plastics manage to travel from the outside world all the way deep down into the placenta, that is the organ in charge to basically feed and protect the developing fetus.
Well, dear listener, doctor Ragusa and colleagues think that the MPs most probably reach the placenta via
