According to a team comprised of researchers from a variety of universities, humans might inhale about 16.2 bits of microplastic every hour which usually contain toxic pollutants and chemicals.
Understanding how they travel in the respiratory system is essential for the prevention and treatment of respiratory diseases, the team said. They developed a computational fluid dynamics model to analyse microplastic transport and deposition in the upper airway.
“Millions of tonnes of these microplastic particles have been found in water, air and soil. Global microplastic production is surging, and the density of microplastics in the air is increasing significantly,” said author Mohammad S Islam. “For the first time, in 2022, studies found microplastics deep in human airways, which raises the concern of serious respiratory health hazards.”
The team explored the movement of microplastics with different shapes (spherical, tetrahedral and cylindrical) and sizes ...