Pathogens can hitch a ride on plastic to reach the sea:
Microplastics are a pathway for pathogens on land to reach the ocean, with likely consequences for human and wildlife health, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.
[...] The pathogens studied—Toxoplasma gondii, Cryptosporidium (Crypto) and Giardia—can infect both humans and animals. They are recognized by the World Health Organization as underestimated causes of illness from shellfish consumption and are found throughout the ocean.
"It's easy for people to dismiss plastic problems as something that doesn't matter for them, like, 'I'm not a turtle in the ocean; I won't choke on this thing,'" said corresponding author Karen Shapiro, an infectious disease expert and associate professor in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. "But once you start talking about disease and health, there's more power to implement change. Microplastics can actually move germs around, and these germs end up in our water and our food."
[...] T. gondii, a parasite found only in cat poop, has infected many ocean species with the disease toxoplasmosis. UC Davis and its partners have a long history of research connecting the parasite to sea otter deaths. It's also killed critically endangered wildlife, including Hector's dolphins and Hawaiian monk seals. In people, toxoplasmosis can cause life-long illnesses, as well as developmental and reproductive disorders.
Crypto and giardia cause gastrointestinal disease and can be deadly in young children and people who are immunocompromised.
"This is very much a problem that affects both humans and animals," said first author Emma Zhang, a fourth-year veterinary student with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. "It highlights the importance of a One Health approach that requires collaboration across human, wildlife and environmental disciplines. We all depend on the ocean environment."
More information: Association of zoonotic protozoan parasites with microplastics in seawater and implications for human and wildlife health, Scientific Reports (2022).
Journal information:Scientific Reports Provided by UC Davis.
Citation :
Pathogens can hitch a ride on plastic to reach the sea (2022, April 26) from https://phys.org/news/2022-04-pathogens-hitch-plastic-sea.html
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @03:47PM (4 children)
When parasite-infested shit is flowing down your rivers, you have MUCH BIGGER problems than any "microplastics".
Meanwhile, exactly what heinous thing would the specialized parasites of mammals be doing when they reach the sea? Pull a magic wand out their nonexistent arse, cast a Polymorph Self, and become specialized parasites of fish?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @04:32PM (3 children)
Your stupidity is answered in the summary.
Some diseases had no vectors from land animals to sea animals but now do. T.Gondii had no way to get from cats and rats to sea mammals (otters, dolphins, whales, seals, etc). Now it does.
Does this remind you, perhaps, of how humans caught HIV and COVID-19 from animal reservoirs, after vectors were established?
Do you think sea life has evolved with immunity to toxoplasmosis? (Did you think N.Am. Indians had genomic smallpox immunity?)
Of fucking course not; protecting against a disease with no vector would be a waste of resources.
This is the same thing. This is a documented novel infectious route, and we may well have our human feedstocks reduced as a result of ecologic carnage, if something really pathogenic to sea life ends up riding these plastic microrafts.
If you haven't got the brain to understand that, go read some Asimov and Niven and come back in a couple of years. This is documented hard science, not sci-fi, and the scope of possible repurcussions is broad, unlike your mind.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @04:54PM
the Lithium Wars of the 22nd century were started over the scarcity of the element used in battery technology to supply the energy needs of a post carbon society. Australia and the Southern Cone countries of South America became puppet states of the major powers for the reserves of the precious metal.
This could have been avoided if instead of depleting the world's oceans for food, we had stuck to land-based proteins.
Post industrialism had created mass depression across civilizations. Antidepressants flushed into our sewers would show up in waterways where the lithium could be directly extracted from fish.
But instead they ate the fish and died from the pathogens present in microplastics.
Eat more chicken. Sure, the hormones in the chicken breast will cause your own man-boobs to enlarge but in a progressive society where no one cares if you're non-binary...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @05:13PM
Humans caught COVID-19 from a lab leak.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @06:40PM
Do not blame YOUR stupid lie on the innocent summary.
"T. gondii infections in particular are widely prevalent in marine mammal populations worldwide", says TFA; what difference is a "vector" for what is already abundant? And yeah, "somehow" the sea mammals happen to have quite good immunity to it; figuring out why is left as an exercise for your nonexistent brain.
As to COVID, guess Fauci and his Chinese partners are animals indeed, but protecting ourselves from that vector is against your party line.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @07:42PM (1 child)
WTF, 3/4 of the comments for this are absolutely unhinged.
One of them, completely without irony marks, says it's brainless to worry about common land-mammal diseases reaching new sea-mammal populations, because land mammals already have those diseases.
I mean, these posts are comedy gold, but presuming they're sincere, whaaaaat theeeeee fuuuuuuck how did the Eternal September turn into the Budding Idiocracy?
I almost want to submit a mod that allows posters to do a quick quiz that checks their grounding in reality, so they can be marked flat-earther/not-flat-earther/declined-to-say.
Maybe... maybe we're being targetted by badly trained text producing artificial systems? That would explain the mostly functional grammar without evidence of critical thinking. I wonder how good the AI-vs-human authorship classifiers have gotten.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @10:51PM
Well, since pathogens can reach the sea on just about anything, clearly the goal of articles like this is to plant the seed for future political application of Microplastic pollution. You know, experts and researchers prove that the potential for damage caused by Microplastic pollution is absolutely endless!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @09:07PM
Crazy catfish ladies on the way?