Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data

3 comments

• culi1 hour ago
  The fact that there&#x27;s so much microplastics everywhere that it&#x27;s hard for us to even study tissue in isolate is already not encouraging.<p>Also the main finding of concern imo in the original Nature paper wasn&#x27;t the finding that we have a plastic fork-worth of microplastics in our brains. It&#x27;s the finding that brain tissue seems to concentrate microplastics at a much higher rate than other tissue in the body<p>I find it concerning that there seems to be such a concerted effort to downplay the significance of that finding
  • nostrademons31 minutes ago
    Is that finding robust under the possibility that the microplastics in the sample were introduced by the gloves used to handle the sample? One could, for example, explain that result with a hypothesis that the reason there&#x27;s more microplastics in brain tissue is that they had more hands touch them with lab gloves than the liver and kidney samples.
  • cryzinger1 hour ago
    In this case, the lab gloves are shedding materials that superficially resemble microplastics under a microscope but aren&#x27;t <i>actually</i> microplastics. (I was concerned about that at first too because of the overlap between food service gloves and lab gloves!)
    • b11241 minutes ago
      I don&#x27;t buy the whole premise.<p>A couple of months ago there were a bunch of news stories, about how maybe oil companies should be sued, just like tobacco companies were.<p>Then, suddenly out of nowhere, it&#x27;s actually the gloves that is the problem. It&#x27;s an excellent counter to such a movement. The scientists are wrong, you see. Microplastics? Overblown!<p>The average joe will read only the headline&#x2F;clickbait, and forever doubt microplastics.
      • cryzinger28 minutes ago
        If anything I think people who only read the headline will incorrectly assume that gloves are full of microplastics :P
• ggm25 minutes ago
  I had strong echoes of a naieve lab experience in the 1970s: testing for organophosphates in seawater at the Forth Estuary was basically impossible except for gross amounts, because the standard analytical glass washing we used contaminated the glassware. You have to maintain a completely independent suite of glassware from pipettes all the way through to reaction vessels, and chromatography cells, and wash them with chromic acid, or special formulations.<p>(I don&#x27;t work in this field any more, I was a lowly bottle washer and lab tech on a job creation scheme, I am sure the field has moved forward)
• Kikawala2 hours ago
  Previously discussed here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47561711">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47561711</a>