Study finds microplastics in our brains are accumulating, with unknown outcomes on our health
Dr. Matthew Campen, a professor at the University of New Mexico College of Pharmacy, has been searching the brains of dead people to find something virtually all of us have polluting inside our skulls: Tiny particles of plastic known as micro and nanoplastics. It's been sort of purifying for the lab — for the boss, that's me, to say "We're going to entertain all hypotheses and we're going to test things and we're going to accept the fact that I'm going to be wrong a lot!" And Dr. Elian El Hayek, one of our co-authors, said, “If you're going to say ‘nano,’ you better see ‘nano.’ And it really challenged us to try different approaches. We've learned a lot about their spread around the planet in the last 20 years, but it's only in the last three or four years that people have started showing them in the human body, and just showing them is a long way away from proving that they do anything. I think there's a huge opportunity for the President of the United States, as well as for leaders of other countries, to establish truly revolutionary, highly beneficial, durable policies that are protective of human health related to plastics, but also friendly to industry and commerce.
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