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Read the following text and answer the quiz below.
[1] How many tiny pieces of plastic are currently inside your body? Headline-grabbing studies over the last few years have claimed to find microplastics throughout the human body – in blood, organs and even the brain. However, some of this research has recently come under criticism from scientists. Some have warned that the studies could not rule out contamination from plastic in laboratories, or that certain techniques could confuse human tissue with plastic.
[2] Seeking a solution to this escalating dispute, 30 scientists from 20 research institutions worldwide proposed a new framework last month for evaluating microplastic research. The proposal, inspired by how forensic science weighs evidence found at crime scenes, offers researchers a consistent way to communicate how confident they are that microplastics have actually been detected.
[3] No one disputes that these mostly invisible pieces of plastic are ubiquitous throughout the environment -- they have been found everywhere from the tops of mountains to the bottom of oceans. It is also “very likely” that we are regularly ingesting microplastics from air and food, Imperial College London researcher Leon Barron told Agence France-Presse. But there simply isn’t enough evidence yet to say whether they are harmful to our health, said the senior author of the new proposal.
[4] Microplastics are very difficult to detect. Yet some research in this new and rapidly expanding field has claimed to have found particles in “less-plausible” areas of the human body, Barron explained. For example, a study published in Nature Medicine early last year reported detecting relatively large particles in the brains of recently deceased people. Some scientists were sceptical because this would require the particles to cross the powerful defences of the blood-brain barrier.
[5] Experts have noted that the technique used in this study and several others, which is called pyrolysis-GC-MS, can confuse fat with polythene, which is used in plastic packaging. The new proposal, published in the journal Environment & Health, calls for researchers to use multiple techniques when searching for microplastics to rule out potential false positives.
[6] Barron compared the proposal to a framework once agreed upon among forensic scientists about how to evaluate fibres found in clothes during a criminal investigation. The idea is to bring “all of the different labs doing this type of work into an aligned language” that expresses how confident they are that they detected microplastics, he said. The idea is already “starting to gain momentum”, he added.
[7] The proposal requires scientists and journal articles to be transparent about their research. “To be clear, microplastics are a problem,” Barron said, explaining that the research conducted thus far has been carried out in good faith. He added that these are normal growing pains for a new scientific field. But precision is important; to determine whether microplastics are harmful to our health, researchers need to know just how much is in our bodies. If the ongoing scientific debate “derails that effort to try and understand if they’re bad for us, that’s not helpful”, he said.
Source: Agence France-Presse, January 27
