When degraded, the plastic material will break into super small pieces. These microplastics unknowingly exist in water, air, and soil so that they contaminate the human body, including babies.
In one study, researchers sifted through baby's soiled diapers and found an average of 36,000 nanograms of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a microplastic material, per gram of feces. This figure is 10 times the amount they find in adult feces.
Researchers even found PET in the first stool of newborns. To note, PET is a very common polymer known as polyester which is used for clothing materials to plastic bottles.
The findings come a year after another research team estimated that brewing hot formula in a plastic bottle was very likely to dissolve the ingredient. This exposes babies to several million microplastics per day, and possibly nearly a billion particles per year.
Quoted from Wired, scientists think that in some ways, babies are exposed to more exposure. In addition to drinking from a bottle, babies can ingest microplastics in a number of ways. For example, they have a habit of putting everything in their mouths, including all kinds of plastic toys, as well as biting into cloth.
In addition, exposure is also obtained from baby food wrapped in single-use plastic, drinking and eating plastic cups and plates, carpets on which they crawl are often made of polyester, even hardwood floors are coated with polymers that release microplastics. All of these can produce small particles that are inhaled or swallowed by children.
Indoor dust is also emerging as a major route of exposure to microplastics, especially for infants. Several indoor air studies have shown that every day, in a typical household, 10,000 microfibers may land on one square meter of soil or floor, after being removed from clothes, sofas and sheets. Babies spend a lot of their time crawling through things, churning out settled fibers and kicking them into the air.
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"Unfortunately, with modern lifestyles, babies are exposed to so many different things that we don't know what effects they can have later in life," said Kurunthachalam Kannan, an environmental health scientist at New York University School of Medicine and a co-author who appears on the paper. journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.
The researchers carried out a tally by collecting soiled diapers from six 1-year-old children and running the feces through a filter to collect microplastics. They did the same with three meconium samples—the newborn's first stool—and stool samples from 10 adults.
In addition to analyzing samples for PET, they are also looking for polycarbonate plastic, which is used as a lightweight alternative to glass, for example in eyeglass lenses. To ensure that they only counted microplastics that came from babies' intestines, and not from their diapers, they ruled out the plastic material that came from diapers, namely polypropylene, a different polymer from polycarbonate and PET.
The results showed that the concentration of PET was 10 times higher in infants than in adults, while polycarbonate levels were more evenly distributed between the two groups. The researchers found smaller amounts of both polymers in meconium, suggesting that babies are born with plastic already in their system. This reinforces previous research that has found microplastics in human placenta and meconium.
Scientists are looking into the impact of exposure to microplastics on the human body, especially babies. Different types of plastic can contain at least 10,000 different chemicals, a quarter of which people are concerned about, according to a recent study from researchers at ETH Zürich in Switzerland.
These additives serve all types of plastic manufacturing purposes, such as providing flexibility, extra strength, or protection from UV exposure. Microplastics may contain heavy metals such as lead, but they also tend to accumulate heavy metals and other pollutants when they fall into the environment. Microplastics also readily grow microbial viruses, bacteria, and fungi, many of which are human pathogens.
Of particular concern is a class of chemicals called endocrine disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, which interfere with hormones and have been linked to reproductive, neurological, and metabolic problems, such as increased obesity. The well-known plastic material bisphenol A, or BPA, is one EDC that has been linked to various types of cancer.
"We should be concerned because EDCs in microplastics have been shown to be associated with several adverse outcomes in human and animal studies. Some microplastics contain chemicals that can interfere with the normal functioning of the endocrine system," said Jodi Flaws, a reproductive toxicologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana. -Champaign, who led the 2020 study on plastics.
Babies are especially susceptible to EDC, as their body's development depends on a healthy endocrine system. "I strongly believe that these chemicals affect the early stages of life. It is a vulnerable period."
This new research adds to the growing body of evidence that babies are highly exposed to microplastics. "This is a very interesting paper with some very worrying numbers," said University of Strathclyde microplastics researcher Deonie Allen, who was not involved in the study. "We need to look at everything children are exposed to, not just their bottles and toys," he said.
Because babies excrete microplastics in their stools, that means the intestines can absorb some of the particles, such as absorbing nutrients from food. This is known as a translocation: i.e. very small particles may pass through the intestinal wall and end up in other organs, including the brain.
Researchers have actually demonstrated this in goldfish by feeding them plastic particles, which are translocated through the intestines and into the head, where they cause brain damage that manifests as behavioral problems. Fish with plastic particles in their brains are known to be less active and eat more slowly.
But it does so with very high concentrations of particles, and in a completely different species. While scientists know that EDC is bad news. They don't yet know what level of exposure to microplastics is needed to cause problems in the human body. "We need more research to confirm the doses and types of chemicals in microplastics that lead to adverse outcomes," Flaws said.
Meanwhile, microplastics researchers say, we can limit children's contact with plastic particles, including not preparing formula milk with hot water in plastic bottles, but using glass bottles and transferring them to plastic bottles after the liquid reaches room temperature.
Also, avoid plastic wrap and containers if possible. In fact, microplastics have polluted every aspect of our lives. So even though we can never get rid of it, at least we can reduce the exposure.
