A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Isn't plastic basically biologically inert? So unless it is physically blocking something shouldn't we have seen adverse effects if it actually was dangerous? Or maybe health problems just haven't been associated with it yet. I think with lead it was obvious pretty quickly. I am a dumbass tho, so maybe someone smarter can correct me.
Plastic is mimicking certain hormones and I'm suspecting that the recent rise in cancer rates is linked to plastic intake.
There is different health implications connected to microplastics like infertility and cardiovascular diseases, although the connections are not quite understood yet. The amount of microplastics in the human body is very alarming though. A study with brain samples found 0.5w% of plastics, which corresponds to roughly 6g of plastic in a brain. That's a credit card's worth of plastic.
This article should give some overview over different findings and implications:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/microplastics-brain-pollution-health
Yeah it'll be like the machine that you find in museums where you put in a quarter and get an injection molded toy hot out of the mold. You just hook your arm up to an IV and it starts extracting your blood and then when it gets enough of the plastic it melts it and pushes it into the mold and spits out a little toy dinosaur.
Just donate plasma. Works great, gives some other schmuck your plastic.
Free 3D printing filament
Blood Benchy Boat.
Blood benchies for the blood god!
This is a post about college loans lmao
Cool, I want a racecar
Unfortunately, the machine only gives you the reverse of what you type into it.
Couldn't they do some dialysis type thing with our blood somehow? Idk shit about science lol
Yes, in theory. It's extremely dangerous and absurdly expensive. It also would only address the microplastics currently in the bloodstream - the ones already embedded into organ tissues wouldn't be reliably filtered out this way.
When it comes to PFAS contamination, people have been having decent results by simply donating blood often. Getting it out of the system via blood does help to reduce overall levels in your body.
I love how we've come back around to bloodletting
Donating plasma works even better. They extract a larger volume of fluids per session, twice a week instead of once every 8 weeks.
Don't worry about the recipient: If you are donating plasma regularly, your PFAS levels will be well below average.
Here's a source for anyone interested. I just tested my well water where I'm at and it's 10x over the legal EPA limit :( . Might be testing my blood next and heading to the plasma donation center!
TIL. Thank you!
Wait, you can donate plasma two times in one week where you are? That feels kinda insane.
In Australia it's 12 weeks for whole blood and 2 weeks for plasma. Or 4 weeks for switching from whole blood to plasma.
It’s so much worse than you realize. All blood and plasma must be obtained by “donation” for obvious ethical reasons, but American prisoners get incentives for participation/punishment for non-participation. Private American medical companies make billions of dollars in profit every year selling blood on the international market, but the prisoners don’t see a dime of it. The sellers are so unscrupulous that they have been caught knowingly selling tainted prisoner blood, and continuing to do so after being caught.
The events you're talking about occurred from the 1970's to 1983. They haven't done prison blood drives in over 40 years.
If you've spent more than 72 hours incarcerated, you are ineligible to donate blood products for 12 months.
Yep! US allows plasma donation up to two times per week, with at least 48 hours between donations.
Can't donate plasma or blood for 8 weeks after donating whole blood, or 16 weeks after donating packed RBCs.
Packed RBCs are basically the reverse of plasma donation. Instead of returning the RBCs and keeping the plasma, they take two units of RBCs and return the plasma.
A woman having a child is the biggest reduction. Make of that what you will. I sure hope the placenta, and not the baby, is getting the remainder. But I am guessing both.
Huh, I thought that they only filtered your blood when donating plasma, hence the PFAS could simply be returned to you. But I have to admit that I'm far from an expert on this matter.
Either way, we kinda have returned to bloodletting being a reasonable medical approach.
They centrifuge your blood and return the RBCs, but the PFAS hangs out in the plasma. Mostly. If there was much in the red blood cells, the liver would be removing it and you'd be pooping it out.
Well, that's great. Can't wait to have a kids toy in my brain.
It's called "plasmapheresis", and they'll pay you $40 twice a week to sit in a chair for an hour while they do it.
They're so nice to do this out of the goodness of their hearts for any random person that asks for the procedure, at a financial loss, with no ulterior motive whatsoever.
I mean, if you really want to, you can go to the hospital and pay them to provide the exact same treatment.
Extreme heat can destroy plastics, if I were to say self immolate would that be enough to remove the imbedded plastics?
Yes, but then you'd open a new hole in the ozone layer.
yes but immolation of thy self could be a hoot
Unfortunately, it doesn't stay in the blood. Sometimes it wedges in nooks and crannies, where I accumulates and doesn't leave until a tumor pushes it out.
yay tumors?
From what I've read yes.
Which is why all this years I had kidney failure I had spent going plastic free as possible, since I had a probably decent plastic free blood. Can't build up much if it gets filtered 3x a week.
The needles a gigantic btw.
You can download a car... but are you allowed to "steal" (get for free) the filament???