Scientists Reveal Just How Far Plastic Can Reach Into Your Lungs
Miniscule fragments of plastic pollution invade the human body every day without our knowing it, not just from eating and drinking but from simply breathing.
By some estimates, the average person inhales a credit card’s worth of plastic every week with unknown health effects. In 2022, scientists found microplastics hiding in the deepest parts of the human lung for the first time.
The worldwide spread of plastic has not only crept up on us, it has crept up in us, and scientists are now rushing to figure out where these pollutants go when we breathe them in, how long they stick around for, and if they have toxic effects.
Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have now tracked the passage of plastic as it flows through the respiratory system. Their model builds on a pioneering attempt in 2023 to identify hotspots where microplastics and nanoplastics might gather in our airways.
That prior study focused mostly on modeling the upper airway tract, but the new study considers how air and particles flow through the entire tract, “from the nasal cavity down to the 13th generation of the bronchial tree”.
It also models three different breathing rates – slow, medium, and fast – and three different sizes of plastic fragments; large microplastics, microplastics, and nanoplastics.
The result is a delicate balance, the researchers say, between the way that gravity drags plastics onto a surface and the way that wind blows them along a passageway.
At a normal breathing rate, the model suggests microplastics in the air can come to cover half the surface area of a nasal cavity. At slower breathing rates, medium-sized pollutants were largely deposited in the upper airway, including the nasal cavity, the voice box, and the junction where the windpipe connects to the throat. Meanwhile, smaller, dust-like particles were distributed more evenly throughout the upper and lower respiratory tract.
See more here Science Alert
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Tom
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We have been using plastic containers for well over 50 years. Are you telling me that the new generation of A/I bio humonic robots will be made of fantastic plastic and cyber guck?
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Ted
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Of course one of the biggest sources of airborne micro and nano plastics is rubber tyre wear. It is also responsible for a huge chunk of this kind of plastic pollutant in the oceans.
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