Microplastics do not just end up in the open sea - in fact, a lot also end up in the ecosystems of the coastal zones, a new study shows and this may threaten wildlife.
COMPOSITE IMAGE: CARINA SIM-SMITH (LEFT); CLEVE HICKMAN AND ANGEL CHIRIBOGA (MIDDLE AND RIGHT)
One autumn day in 2019, Michelle Kelly and Carina Sim-Smith were cleaning out the storage room of the Auckland marine lab where they worked. Among the floor-to-ceiling units of shelves brimming with jars of alcohol-preserved sea sponge specimens were a couple of long-forgotten plastic boxes packed with hundreds of jars. Peering inside, “Michelle was like ‘Oh my goodness. Cleve’s sponges,’” recalls Sim-Smith, a marine scientist at ClearSight Consultants.
Cleve is Cleve Hickman, a retired Washington and Lee University marine biology professor who had collected the sponges nearly two decades earlier during a scuba diving expedition in the Galápagos Islands. He had sent the specimens to sponge expert Kelly in New Zealand, but due to a dearth of funding for laborious identification work, the sponges had gathered dust in storage for years. Now that they’d been rediscovered, Sim-S
New-onset anxiety and depression are frequently seen after a first-time implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) implant, Danish researchers confirm.
Within the first 2 years, clinical levels of anxiety and depression were recorded in 14.5% and 11.3%, respectively, of patients who had been free of such symptoms prior to receiving the device, Susanne Pedersen, PhD (Odense University Hospital, University of Southern Denmark, Odense), reported recently during the virtual European Heart Rhythm Association Congress 2021.
“The take-home message here is that it is insufficient if we only screen ICD patients [for these symptoms] at baseline,” because these cases would be missed, she said. “And we know that anxiety and depression are risk factors for premature mortality, but also cardiac arrhythmias.”
New-Onset Anxiety, Depression an Ongoing Risk for ICD Patients medscape.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from medscape.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Soon after the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported, a mask quickly became part of face wear.
The University of Southern Denmark estimates that every minute we throw away 3 million face masks, and chances are high these will end up as an environmental threat even greater than that posed by plastics.
Wearing of masks, especially in public, is a health requirement -enforced no less by the use fines. It seems as though the unintended and greater risk of a contaminated environment was not factored. There is little guidance from the authorities on how safely to dispose of masks.