Now our world, and our bodies, even our blood, are carrying an unholy load of this material, and many will go to our graves with plastic as part of our remains. The price to be paid for plastics that pollute on the micro-level is becoming apparent, but what can we do, and how much damage will it cause every living thing on Earth?

Prior research on the ocean floor had discovered that microplastics and nanoplastics had settled and become a part of the aquatic environment. Once there, they were incorporated into both bacteria and filter-feeding phytoplankton, which were then ingested by filter-feeding sea creatures.✓

Seagrass meadows in the Mediterranean have been doing their best in the war against plastic ocean pollution. Mysterious orbs, named “Neptune balls,” appearing on beaches along the Spanish coast have revealed their true intent — survival of the oceans.

The oceans themselves have a solution that has been working against the hidden toxicity escaping our peering eyes. Now the ocean’s answer is becoming apparent. Seagrass meadows not only protect delicate beaches but the sea as well.

The removal of microplastic accumulation in the marine environment is facilitated by the development of microbial biofilms that form on the microplastic surface. The production of these biofilms is through colonization by microorganisms. This film then provides a sticky matrix, perfect for adhesion to ocean vegetation.

But the meadows themselves may be under attack by another force — urbanization. The decline of these meadows has been noted, and some recovery is shown, but only by decreasing urbanization nearby.

The advent of synthetic fibers to make fabric for clothing in the 1930s was the dawn of the microplastic pollution era. Cleaning clothing in washing machines or any vigorous movement to launder them, especially polyester, polyester-cotton blends, and acrylic fibers, releases microplastic into the wash water.

Natural fibers have contributed their share of pollution in the environment. Research “studies on the transport of hazardous chemicals by natural fibers in aquatic environments are rare….” However, they are still pollutants through the chemicals they may contain or the cleaning processes.

When you eat any foods caught from the seas, farmed in ocean bays or inland tanks, or in feedlot operations, the danger still lurks, safe from the naked eye as it enters the food chain. 

When plastic ends up in the environment, it tends to bind with environmental pollutants. With plastic that moves through the food chain, the attached toxins can also move and accumulate in animal fat and tissue through a process called bio-accumulation.

Whether you eat fruits or fish, you may still not be safe from plastic consumption because it’s used everywhere. The plasticizers and pesticides (PE and PP) are being ingested with every bite. You are then giving those toxic products access to every square inch of your body, and they will deposit or transform in you. How can they harm you?

The harm included cell death and allergic reactions, and the research is the first to show this happens at levels relevant to human exposure. However, the health impact to the human body is uncertain because it is not known how long microplastics remain in the body before being excreted.

Estimates are that 50K particles a year are consumed by humans, and they are found in everything from drinking water to beer, sugar, salt, and shellfish. Ever wonder if that luscious fresh mussel was safe? Maybe not.

According to the study, the authors of the study found the microplastics found in the mussels were from single-use plastic products, fabrics, and ropes from the fishing industry. The findings were published online recently in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Is pollution a problem for the third-world or each one of us? If you eat, it’s a problem for you, and I don’t know that organic products might not contain some form of plastic pollution. Are you sure that olive oil is safe?

The post Eating Plastic in Every Bite We Take and Never Knowing the Effect on Our Health appeared first on Medika Life.

There are myriad diseases that are currently linked to the impact of environmental toxins, but it doesn’t end there. There are more important long-term issues that will only grow progressively more challenging in the coming decades. These exist alongside the toxic climate we have created for our health. Issues like access to clean potable water, population density, plastics, and a host of other challenges.

Alongside these issues, racial disparities in health and society disproportionately shift the outcome of these pollutants and challenges onto the shoulders of racial minorities. Wealth acts as insulation, allowing access to superior levels of care, organic foods, and healthy lifestyle choices, including the ability to locate your family to areas where pollutants are less dense.

Poorer communities are however locked into a narrow band of choices, none of which are beneficial to their health.

These issues must be addressed. We can no longer afford to ignore them as chronic disease becomes our new normal. We believe that this is where the real challenge to our societal and global health will lie in the coming years. We also believe we’ve passed a tipping point and only desperate and immediate action will enable us to claw back a vestige of the damage we have inflicted, both to our home and ourselves.

If like us, you have concerns or would like to raise awareness, share a passionate and well-researched point of view on diseases and the environment, or other relevant environmental issues, then we would love to provide an audience for your thoughts. We’re also really big on solutions, which are in short supply, and FINN Partners is offering an added incentive to the best article we receive.

Our appreciation to frequent Medika Life contributor Gil Bashe, FINN Partners, Global Health Chair, and colleague Bob Martineau, JD, Senior Partner, Environmental and Sustainability, for their articles, commitment to EcoHealth, and support for this new editorial section.

A word from FINN Partners

For decades we have thought, written, and studied how environmental conditions and social determinants influence public health. Now as fires rage across the Pacific Northwest United States and floodwaters rise in Central Europe we see how environmental sustainability impacts human survival across developing and developed nations. 

Environmental health links directly to global public health. Medika Life has been serving as an editorial meeting ground for health professionals across the spectrum to explore how health is central to all human progress and continuity. 

Medika Life’s editors determined we will champion greater editorial discussion with a new section dedicated to EcoHealth. To encourage editorial submission, Medika Life and FINN Partners will honor an outstanding editorial contribution with a $500 donation made in the author’s honor to a global non-profit dedicated to environmental public health. 

Submissions

If you are active on Medium, please submit a draft of your work to Medika’s publication on Medium, BeingWell. If you’re not already a contributing author, please reach out to BeingWell’s EIC, Dr Jeff Livingston who will happily assist you in the process.

You can email Jeff at jefflivingmd@medika.life or reach out to our other editors, Dr. Hesham A. Hassaballa, Lisa Bradburn or Dr. Patricia Farrell.

If your article is one of those selected it will be published immediately on Medika Life and scheduled for subsequent publication on BeingWell. We will set up a dedicated author profile for you or your organization on the Medika site and you can submit additional material at your convenience.

Please note that as Medika caters to medical and health professionals, we will only consider materials from appropriately qualified authors and stakeholders. If you have questions or pitches you’d like to discuss, you can contact Medika’s EIC, Robert Turner, or reach out via email to robertturner@medika.life.

If you are not on Medium, you can submit articles directly to Robert on the email above. Please submit attachments in Word format or you are welcome to provide a link to a shared Google document.

The winning article will be selected by an editorial team from both Medika Life and Finn Partners and will be announced on the 31st of August, 2021. The relevant author will be notified by email and the article will be extensively advertised across social media. 

All rights are retained by authors on materials published to Medika Life.

The post The Environment and Our Health. Medika’s Open Call for Articles from Stakeholders appeared first on Medika Life.

If you’re not up to speed on the common ingredient Glyphosate, a systemic weed killer used for decades and the basic active component of Roundup, this enlightening hour-long documentary from Aljazeera entitled The Price of Progress: How safe is European food production? will give you all the relevant context you need.

This article isn’t about whether Roundup or Glyphosate is safe or not. While this is clearly a question that needs to be urgently addressed, as the compound ends up in most of the food we eat and is used across the globe as our primary weed killer, there is a clear and growing consensus that there is in fact trouble in paradise and that the world’s favorite weed killer may not just be killings weeds.

The inflexible scientist

To understand how science can get things wrong, let’s turn to more current events and a disclaimer before we start. Science, good science, is critical to our survival. Without it, we’d be pottering around in the dark still, hitching horses to sleds with no wheels. Science is however a tool, and its one that is subject to our human tendency to assume we know everything, even when science tells us exactly the opposite. It’s this human tendency for certainty that causes problems. That and our proclivity for harnessing good for bad.

Take the SARS-CoV2 virus. The WHO categorically stated in March of 2020 that the virus could not become aerosolized or airborne. Six foot was all you needed and a face covering. Droplets. Not fine particles. For nearly a year, American-based scientists argued with the WHO, telling them they were making a massive mistake. They had proof that the virus could in fact “float about” for extended periods in the air, just like the measles and TB virus.

After a year of vocal and very public outrage by a growing number of scientists, the WHO capitulated. They agreed that the virus was in fact airborne and that the only real protection was a proper, well-sealed N95 grade mask and proper ventilation. They had been wrong, spectacularly so and the evidence and the science they’d been shown was ignored. Why? Their inability to question accepted scientific dogma in the face of new research cost lives.

You cannot argue this, it is fact. The advice the WHO issued led to many of the policies that engaged close-quarter lockdowns for many across the globe. Had the world been put on notice earlier, we may have been able to avert many deaths. It didn’t happen and not because science was wrong, but because WHO scientists and experts had become fixated in their beliefs, inflexible, and unwilling to listen without prejudice to new research. 

The WHO based their advice on data that was over 80 years old and they wilfully ignored new data, new research, and new information.

You can read more about this particular story here in a fantastic piece on Wired. It’s a fascinating indictment of our scientific regulatory systems and the people that decide our fates. It also exposes exactly how certain mechanisms employed by groups like the WHO and EU regulatory bodies can compromise, discount, and dismiss out of hand, honest and open scientific exploration. 

There is a maximum in science that institutionalized scientists choose to willfully and arrogantly ignore. Never say never.

The influence of the mighty dollar

To what extent is grift involved in this process, the direct or indirect enrichment of individuals, projects, and organizations by the very companies that regulators are asked to police? Hugely so, it’s an open secret, widely known and largely glossed over as the part of the game politics, science and big corporations engage in. Again, the public is the inevitable victim of the gatekeeper’s complicity.

Companies like Monsanto budget hundreds of millions of dollars annually for lobbyists. Individuals who operate in the shadows, quietly influencing political policy, legislation, and the passing of corporate-friendly bills. In the halls of political power in Brussels, these lobbyists have become permanent fixtures, as have their colleagues across the water in Washington, filling the coffers of politicians and influential individuals from a bottomless pit of wealth.

It’s not just companies like Monsanto who pursue this practice. Big Pharma, energy companies like Shell and Enron, and almost every sector of big business is accounted for. Grift is how you oil the wheels of progress and science ends up on the losing end. We end up on the losing end. It’s a simple question of logic. Any act or business dealing that requires financial lubrication to enable its deployment, is by its very nature questionable. If you see a lobbyist, it’s a sure bet a potential crime or cover-up is afoot.

The losers are you and I, our children, our environment, and most importantly, our health. It is, without doubt, the one single mechanism that contributes most to the growing list of ailments Americans and their global counterparts suffer from. Mothers, who now question the wiseness of being able to breastfeed their children, as their breastmilk is contaminated with dangerous toxins, antibiotic-resistant super bacteria, and skyrocketing levels of cancers, obesity, diabetes, and conditions like autism. We are being systematically poisoned and our scientists and governments are complicit.

They achieve this by circumventing processes put in place to protect us and the practice of good science leads this list. We establish risk and identify dangers with science, data science, and unimpeded, transparent research. Lobbyists seek to undermine all these processes or, ideally, bypass them completely.

It happens with companies like Shell promoting and exploiting fossils fuels at the cost of the environment, with pharma pushing the envelope of what is legally licensable and suppressing that which it cannot profit from, chemical companies polluting our rivers and water tables and in instances like Monsanto, questionable products are whitewashed and rubber stamped. There are, quite literally billions to be made, and everyone demands a slice of the pie.

Hens Teeth and independent researchers

They’re a dying breed, the independent researcher, a rare beast that hasn’t been corrupted by the ever-present influence of corporate reach. Research isn’t cheap and the best paying jobs don’t reside in academia. Most researchers cut their teeth in laboratories funded or directly owned by Monsanto or their peers. Universities are the feral breeding ground of conscription, where generous donations ensure a constant feed of new young minds, grist for the mills of profit-based research.

While this shouldn’t appear to be a major problem on the surface, after all, individuals are entitled to go where their purse strings draw them, when it comes to appointing or recruiting staff for regulatory bodies, conflicts of interest abound. To try and find, for instance, a scientist to work on agricultural pesticides, who hasn’t at some point in their career, been indentured to either Monsanto or one of their competitors, becomes challenging, to say the least.

The end result is far from ideal, with the opportunity for past relationships, friendships, loyalties, and a host of other factors to impinge on open and transparent research. To sway opinion and research. In some instances, as suggested by the documentary above, companies like Monsanto enjoy such close relationships with regulators they forward their own prepared documents for simple rubber-stamping by the regulators, who then issue the statements as their own.

Clearly, a problem exists and one that isn’t going to simply resolve itself. There are also serious questions that require addressing when it comes to the mindset displayed by supposed science-based institutions like the CDC and WHO, where scientists have arguably exchanged their white mantles of science for the darker cloaks of politics and profit. 

When these individuals are no longer able to question their own beliefs and firmly held opinions in the face of incontrovertible evidence, then science is the loser, humanity suffers and our health becomes forfeit. Accountability matters, transparency matters. The pursuit of truth and real science cannot and must not be impeded by anything as mundane as profit or politics. To allow this to continue is to doom the very society we seek to protect.

The post Monsanto, Roundup, and Glyphosate. Whose Side is Science on and Why it Matters to Us? appeared first on Medika Life.