OF PLASTICS & HUMAN PLACENTA: MEET THE "PLASTICENTA" (Pt 4/4 - PLASTIC POLLUTION)

Keywords: plastics, plastic, microplastics, mesoplastics, macroplastics, megaplastics, nanoplastics, pollution, pollutants, environment, fetus, foetus, placenta, placentas, birth, women, pregnancy, health, human health, food, food chain, food safety, additives, plasticizer, plasticizers, ocean, oceans, marine fauna, sea, seas, zooplankton, shellfish, fish, fauna, animals, Anthropocene

Part 1 is here

Part 2 is here

Part 3 is here

(Read other plastic related stories here & here)

 

Plastic pollution (by @sciencemug)

[Frog pic, by Alexas_Fotos is a free to use (for editorial use only) image (source: pixabay.com); adapted by @sciencemug]

 

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Ooooh, hello dear English speaking-reading-hearing reader, 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 rolling, just to see what happens, a perfect, but surprisingly less expensive than one could think, replica of the dices Einstein’s god actually left on the cosmic green table once done with them, 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 twerking is to elegance. 

Today I’m gonna tell you the last part (the first three are here, here, aaand here) of a story about human placentas and plastics! 

A group of Italian researchers (aka the Italian Brains, aka the ITBs) finds microplastics fragments (MPs), that is plastic particles smaller than half a centimeter, in placentas of women in good health and who have had normal pregnancies and deliveries.

The study is lead by Medical Doctor Antonio Ragusa, Head of the Department of Woman, Mother and Newborn of the San Giovanni Calibíta Fatebenefratelli, in Rome, and Dr. Ragusa and colleagues’ research is told in a paper (P) published on the science journal Environment International. 

Aand, dear reader, at the end of the post be sure not to miss reading the answers kind Doctor Ragusa gave to this blog’s three questions for the "Oddities & Bloopers: The Researcher's Fun Corner". 

Oook, so, people, read the previous posts to learn what the Italian Brains did to finally make their troubling discovery.

I just remind you that microplastics most probably enter human body via inhalation and ingestion, and that they are dangerous for human health, and, of course, for a developing fetus. 

Aaaaand in this fourth and final part of the post, then, we’re gonna find out how massive and widespread plastic presence in the environment be and therefore how often and easily you humans are exposed to plastic pollution, and how harmful this kind of pollution be to life-forms in general, and you sapiens people in particular.

Let’s start with the “massive and widespread plastic presence in the environment” topic.

POLLUTION ON HIGH

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 air-guitar playing heavy-metal songs but instead of air is using helium so every gesture is high pitched and funny and the metal is lighter, 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 Eng?ish, a language that is to proper English what a complete lack of logic is to something you can easily distill from the just mentioned helium-guitar playing thing.

Today I’m gonna tell you a story ‘bout pollution on high. 

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Sooo, dear listener, you probably already heard that the top of the world, Mount Everest, if full of crap by now. Meaning not that it has become an unbearable arrogant mount full of itself always bragging for being the tallest of them all (at least above sea level), nope, meaning that, given the massive amount of people that climb it every year (since 1953), well, it is now full of human garbage.

Aaand, dear listener, you probably also already heard that space, around our planet, is by now full of garbage too. There’s in fact a lot of space junk orbiting our world: old satellites, pieces of rockets, debris of various sizes and nature, in conclusion objects in the millions that are a constant real serious threat for whoever and whatever is or is going to orbit Earth nowadays.

But the pollution on high I am going to tell you about today, dear listener, is none of the above.

And it is not even the pollution people that are high produce when smoking dope or other garbage of the kind...

No, dear listener, I am going to talk of a kind of pollution you find in the sky, in the atmosphere, but that you wouldn’t expect at all, of all the pollutants you can think of, to find up there.

And above all, to find in the rain that comes down from up there…

You wanna know what this pollutant is?

Eeeh, let’s start from the beginning then.

The US. Geological Survey, the United States “sole science agency for the Department of the Interior”, publishes a report (R) which I’ll call ReportX, since I’m not telling you its actual title as it would be a major give away about the mysterious atmospheric/rain pollutant this whole episode/post is about, and I want to keep the suspense going as long as possible. 

"ReportX about rain pollution": free pic by John-Mark Smith on Pexels; Adapted by @sciencemug

Anyway, ReportX is written by Gregory Wetherbee, an expert of Environmental Science, Austin Baldwin, an hydrologist [that is a dude who studies “how water moves across and through the Earth’s crust” (source: Boureau of Labor and Statistics)], and Professor James Ranville, a chemist and geochemist of the Colorado School of Mines. We’ll call ‘em the ReportX Guys (aaaah such a clever and witty blog/podcast I am!).

The ReportX Guys