A small metal chamber in a metal room in a tightly sealed Brisbane lab contains one of the rarest things on earth – a space almost entirely free of plastic.
They are big questions that will take time to answer, and one of the first steps is to understand how humans might be internally exposed to minuscule particles of plastic.But when plastic contamination is literally everywhere, how can scientists be confident that any particles they might find are evidence that plastic is crossing membranes in the human body?
Sarah Dunlop and Kevin Thomas outside the Minderoo Centre – Plastics and Human Health research facility at the University of Queensland.When they are finally inside the clean room and it’s time to open brain and other samples, it’s done in a smaller metal chamber, a kind of clean room within a clean room.
Most people have heard of microplastics – small fragments of plastic that are less than 5 millimetres in length. But they’re enormous compared to the nanoplastics Thomas is looking for, the kind that might be capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier that protects it from circulating toxins or pathogens.
“The body may be able to deal with it, or there may be mechanisms that occur that may start some sort of adverse outcome.” “We are fighting the invisible. You can see the plastic floating in the ocean, but you can’t see the plastic pollution in us,” she said.
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