The health implications of tiny plastic fragments invading lungs are unknown, but it’s a growing health concern, especially for children.
While disposable masks have become a blight on the environment during the pandemic, tangled up on shores, blowing along roadways and into fields and streams, they may cause far more environmental damage than animals getting tangled up in them. Not only are they laden with the mouth and excretory germs of the humans who discarded them, but it turns out that a key ingredient in the ubiquitous disposable hospital masks seen littering land and seascapes since 2020 — polypropylene — degrades into tiny, microscopic fibers of plastic that a growing body of research shows wreaks havoc on aquatic creatures and has the potential to cause disease, including cancer, in humans.
Now, microplastic fibers have been discovered deep in the lower lungs of living human beings – in almost every person sampled… » Read full article
