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Micro-plastics: An invisible danger to human health
Summary
This review examined microplastics as invisible but pervasive threats to human health, summarizing exposure routes via air, water, and food, and reviewing evidence from animal studies linking microplastic exposure to inflammation, oxidative stress, endocrine disruption, and reproductive harm, while calling for urgent human epidemiological research.
Microplastics are small plastic pieces ranging between the size of 1-5 micrometre (µm). Because of their small size and their continuity, it has the potential to spread throughout all parts of our environment. These are ubiquitous environmental contaminants leading to inevitable human exposure. It can enter our bodies through ingestion, inhalation and dermal contact. It has already been found in various human foods, beers, drinking water, honey, seafood, sugar, table salt etc. It is demonstrated that marine organisms including zooplanktons, bivalves, crustaceans, worms, fish, reptiles etc. ingest microplastic. Around 2% to 40% of fishes were found to be contaminated with microplastic. It can reach our stomach and due to its size , these are either excreted, get entrapped in intestinal lining and stomach or move freely in body fluids like blood, thereby reaching various organs and tissues of body. To tackle this serious issue of microplastic pollution in environment and in human health, various effective policies must take under consideration all stages of lifecycle of plastic connecting producers to users and ultimately to waste managers. Thus, we have to seem for potential effects of microplastics in living beings, which specializes in the pathways of toxicity and exposure, way to reduce microplastic pollution, sources of invisible plastics. Present work was conducted to explore the possible threats of micro as well as nanoplastic particles to humanity as well as to our ecosystem. Under this study we summarized various aspects of this critical issue, which provide better scientific knowledge for future research.
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