this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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This is expensive and time consuming Because this is not a permanent solution (the patient will get reinundated with microplastics shortly after the procedure), they will need reapplications throughout their whole lives. Thus, this will likely only be available to the ultrarich.
The article does point out that prevention is still the best solution. But the corpos make that hard.
There are other ways to lower the amount of plastic in you. If you donate your blood you can measurably lower your pfas levels. Really just removing blood which carries plastic through your whole body will also lower your concentration of plastics. Because plastic is in the water, make sure you drink filtered water. They do make filters that will catch micro plastics and some will advertise it. If you want to keep your levels lower avoid hydrophobic coatings that sit next to food for extended periods of time and definitely don't heat that food next to a hydrophobic coating. Think microwaving food in a container with coatings that'll leach into the food. So bags of popcorn should be avoided like the plague, unfortunately.
Source: Veritasium, skip to at least 50:15, but honestly I'd recommend watching the whole thing https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY.
I'm pretty sure regular blood letting is actually not great for you either.
Describing donating a pint of blood every several weeks as “regular bloodletting” is really something. I mean I guess in a literal sense that is what is happening, but they literally will not take your blood if it is not safe to do so, including donating too recently.
Edit: by the way, after thinking about this for only a few moments longer, i have realized you can probably do even better just by donating plasma only, and now you are not even losing your blood cells.
I know pfas levels are immediately lower after the donation. I'm not under the impression that pfas levels stay low for very long i.e. long enough to safely donate blood again.
Plasma donations can be done more frequently, though, so that might be actually effective way to reduce contamination.
But, it's kind of messed up that we're donating contaminated blood and/or plasma. Is that good for the people that use our blood? Who knows!
I think it’s definitely worth doing some serious math first before publicly writing it off. Even if its a marginal benefit, as long as its just a tiny bit greater than the marginal benefit you get from intentionally avoiding exposures as much as reasonably possible, then over time the PFAS levels will come down slowly but steadily
Secondly, no its not okay to give people contaminated blood. But the blood is contaminated with something basically everyone is contaminated with already, and the person who needs transfusion will likely die without it, so it is kind of moot.
But after only a few more moments of thought, if we were really concerned about it, we could just perform the dialysis on all the donated blood and plasma after it has been taken where we have economies of scale and nobody needs to be hooked up to a machine for it
Looks like patients that receive hemodialysis treatment have lower pfas levels, so that actually might be viable!