By Recently, Thomson Reuters Foundation discovered that tiny trace of plastic could be found in drinking water. According to the foundation, tiny pieces of plastic have been found in drinking water on five continents – from Trump Tower in New York to a public tap on the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda. This, according to their findings poses a potential risk to people’s health.
In a report filed by Anna Pujol-Mazzini, Mazzini noted that plastic degrades over time into tiny particles known as microplastics, which were found in 83 percent of samples from Germany to Cuba to Lebanon analysed by U.S.-based digital news organisation Orb Media.
“If you ask people whether they want to be eating or drinking plastic, they just say: ‘No, that’s a dumb question’,” Sherri Mason, one of the study’s authors and a chemistry professor at the State University of New York jokingly asserted.
“It’s probably not something that we want to be ingesting, but we are, whether through our drinking water, through beer, juice. It’s in our food, sea-salt, mussels. Nobody is safe,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Microplastics of up to 5 millimeters are also in bottled water, she equally added. It is however stated that ‘the health impacts of ingesting plastics are unclear.’ But studies on fish have shown they inhibit hatching of fertilised eggs, stunt growth, and make them more susceptible to predators, which in turn increase mortality rates.
The report further revealed that ‘microplastics absorb toxic chemicals from the marine environment, which are released into the bodies of fish and mammals who consume them.
In addition, it is confirmed that many studies have shown the prevalence of microplastics in the world’s oceans, where more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic are floating. However, this is the first time research has been conducted into drinking water, therefore, the research continues.