Author: Robbie Gonzalez / Source: WIRED
Every minute, a dumptruckful of plastic plops into the world’s oceans. That’s eight billion metric tons every year. Once waterborne, whatever doesn’t wash ashore eventually breaks down into itty bits. The puniest pieces—the ones smaller than 5 millimeters wide—are called microplastics, and their fates are numerous. Some glob onto an Alaska-sized gyre of plastic debris swirling in the Pacific Ocean. Others sink to a variety of depths, according to their densities, perfusing the world’s waters.
Still others get ingested by marine life, including fish and shellfish, which are in turn ingested by other animals, like birds and humans.All of this is a mess, from an ecological perspective. But it’s that last bit—the microplasticine infiltration of food webs—that worries not just ecologists but gastroenterologists. If microplastics are invading the things we eat, it’s possible that they’re invading our stomachs and intestines, too. But while the matryoskha-nature of food chains certainly suggests that human guts harbor microplastics, nobody’s really bothered to look in a systematic way.
Until now! Today at the United European Gastroenterology meeting in Vienna, researchers announced they have detected microplastics in stool samples from every single one of a small group of international test subjects. “Plastics are pervasive in everyday life and humans are exposed to plastics in numerous ways,” said Philipp Schwable, a gastroenterologist at the Medical University of Vienna, who led the study, via email. And yet, even he did not expect that every poo would test positive.
The pilot study tested eight subjects from eight different countries: Austria, Italy, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and the UK.
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