The world “is drowning under the weight of plastic pollution, with more than 430 million tonnes of plastic produced annually,” a report by the United Nations said last year. Microplastics ripple through ecosystems and end up entering human and animal bodies through food and water. Scientists are concerned about the potential impacts of microplastics on reproductive health after finding “significant concentrations” of them in human testicular tissue.
This alarming finding heightens concerns about the possible effects of plastic pollution on male fertility. The study was published in the journal Toxicological Sciences . Here’s all we know about it.
The study A team of researchers from the University of New Mexico examined 46 canine tissue samples from private veterinarian clinics and animal shelters in the City of Albuquerque, as well as anonymised postmortem tissue from 23 human testes provided by the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator. All analysed samples included microplastics, with an average concentration of 122.63 microgrammes per gramme in dogs and 329.
44 microgrammes per gramme in people. “At the beginning, I doubted whether microplastics could penetrate the reproductive system (at all),” Xiaozhong “John” Yu, a professor at the University of New Mexico’s College of Nursing and leader of the study, said in a statement to The Guardian . “When I first received the results for dogs I was surprised.
I was even more surprised when I received .
