I've seen memes showing a news headline "doctors baffled by microplastic in human lungs", juxtaposed with an unrelated headline that mentions face masks are made of the same plastic.
The form matters. The plastic in masks is not inhalable, and in all likelihood wearing a mask reduces inhaled plastics like it reduces inhaling of any other solid.
The article specified that all masks tested other than KN95 masks produced more microplastics than they filtered out (it didn't mention if they tested surgical masks).
This is not a bad result, since if you want to filter out viruses to protect the wearer (vs minimize general transmission), the N95/KN95 masks are the only ones worth wearing.
Quality matters, all items in a category are not the same.
Oh, agreed, there. KN-95 masks are the only types I’ve been using for over a year, so I just kind of assumed that. Many cloth masks do very little so I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually make it worse.
My concern is with all the infants. Being able to gawk out and stare at all the many faces you see, and how they respond to you has got to be foundational to your discovery of the world. If had to place a bet on a major "net negative" I'm going all in on this.
I have one friend who absolutely swears that "covid babies" are a thing, and that you can spot them from across the room. I haven't yet figured out what that means, but I tend to believe her.
So not sure I can really quality/quantify it, but just like this article, maybe someone will try and an article with a catchy title will be written about it.
Infants basically ignore strangers or have mild interest in them.
Infant eyesight is not good for distance; their perception is also in its infancy (their eyes detect photons but their brains are still learning to interpret the signals); their attention is correlated more strongly to sound than vision because sound is what they get in the womb.
I mention strangers because the immediate caregivers of infants were generally not wearing masks around them most of the time even during the depths of the pandemic.
Your friend is most likely engaged in motivated reasoning via confirmation bias; they are seeing what they expect and want to see. Infants in general often look spaced out or alarmed. Their facial expressions should not be taken to infer internal emotional state comparable to what an adult feels. Infant brains don’t yet work like adult brains.
In addition, it’s not like COVID-19 is the first time human babies have been exposed to masks. Mask-wearing in public has been normal in some Asian cultures for decades, and of course some Muslim women cover their faces at all times outside the home.
As a parent in the thick of babies exactly at this age and surrounded by other parents in the same situation, I cannot tell the difference between a "covid" baby and any other.
What I can tell you is how much time and effort the parents are putting into the baby, and whether is home-schooled or goes to school/daycare.
First child? They're probably walking early. Third kid? They'll be pushing a year and a half old with barely 5 words in their repertoire and I'll consider them lucky if they can hold themselves upright using a chair for support.
The parents with 3 young kids just don't have the bandwidth to provide the kind of attention that the baby needs.
I essentially think about it this way - consider how much information AlphaGo has to learn with. Now consider how much information your brain processes with only your vision. You think there's gonna be a statistically relevant causation because there's a piece of fabric on the adult's face?
I can't say for certain, but from my daily sampling it's much less than you intuitively would think. Kids are resilient and motivated to learn.
Also good points to consider. The parental investment factor probably is a much more dominant factor in the equation too. Curiosity and resilience too.
And thanks for a charitable understanding of the "covid baby" idea: obviously "all babies right now are covid babies" so this is a comparison of "pre-covid" vs "now" (and that early on, that line was much blurrier).
I've got a covid baby, born June 2020. We're lucky enough that she was able to start school at 3 months old, and since then basically every adult she's interacted with (excluding us parents, but including grandparents) has been masked. These days her and her classmates are starting to wear their masks more often, but it's not fully required until she's 2. She seems well adjusted, social, super playful, and loves exploring the world as much as any kid I've ever known.
I also grew up in the era where you were never ever supposed to use your real name or upload pictures of your face to the internet, and have absolute disdain for this weird webcam culture where people insist on seeing each-other's faces while interacting with them.I think the rise in racism and other forms of hatred on the internet ties directly to the increase in people making photographs of themselves central to their identity. I'm actually kind of hoping her generation grows up with less emphasis on appearance. Maybe we have a couple years here with a few less narcissists. Only good things can come out of such developments IMO.
> I have one friend who absolutely swears that "covid babies" are a thing, and that you can spot them from across the room.
I don't dismiss this out of hand, it is at least somewhat plausible to me that less facial exposure might impact infant development. However, I can also probably spot a covid baby at least somewhat reliably across the room, because I'd just look for any baby that's seems like they're less than 2-3 years old, so I'm not certain that being able to do so reveals very much.
I can also spot a Trump baby across the room, which is obviously totally different than a Biden baby. I'll take the liberty of not revealing my meaning either, of course.
You'd notice it in professional populations, I'd wager.
I also assume it would be a confounding factor in any study that involved masks, if it was a significant effect. "Weird, the group that breathed in asbestos for 20 years without wearing a mask had 90% more lung cancer than the masked group, but 20% less XYZ. Does asbestos exposure prevent XYZ?"
Dental hygienists might be another group that could be studied, and hopefully one with fewer confounding factors.
As an added bonus they're usually (in the Before Times) wearing surgical masks as opposed to a [K]N-95, which is anecdotally a lot more reflective of what the general population is wearing (if they're wearing anything at all).
Edited to add:
As an added, added bonus, dental hygienist skews heavily female, whereas construction and remediation skews heavily male. Female populations also wouldn't have the confounding factor of facial hair, which interferes with the seal of a respirator.
Full disclosure: I type all this while I'm wearing a half-face respirator with P-100 cartridges on it because I'm doing a bunch of sanding today. I also have a goatee. Read into that what you will.
It didn't seem to make a difference at all when Scotland and Wales had mask mandates but England didn't, although I've not seen a rigorous analysis of why this was.
Fun fact: 0.3 micron particles are the most penetrating particles of any size, including smaller particles. It’s counterintuitive, but 0.1 micron particles will be filtered out more easily than 0.3 micron particles. [0] That’s in fact why all masks are rated this way, since it gives you the absolute worst case. It’s fair to say that an N95 would filter out at least 95% of all particles.
Fibers embedded in lung tissue is how asbestos causes lung cancer, so wouldn't surprise me. Wearing a mask for an entire work day, than inevitably some of those mask fibers will get to your lungs. Its only a question if your lung tissue is not able to clear out some of them, that will cause inflammation, that long term can lead to cancer.
certain groups (nurses, doctors or certain workers) have to wear a masks all of the time for years. It would have definitely been noticed if it would cause such effects...the control group exists, just compare it to the rest. It would have been obvious.
But those groups are particular ones that are also exposed to other environments that affect health so any discrepancy will be hard to attribute.
Also, doctors did not wear masks to the extend we did during Corona. They'd only wear them during some surgery, not the whole day including even outside.
True, I used a fresh one every day during the worst of it, but I have to say I've gone back to doing exactly what you describe. The only place I still need one is public transport and now that it's getting hot (Spain) I often go outside without a coat, so my pocket is the only place to leave it. And it seems like a waste to replace it after one 15 minute ride on the subway.
And I'm not the only one, I've seen a lot of people wearing ones that are all fluffy from long use and sometimes washing (some people really wash disposable masks). I'm sure that will increase shedding a lot.
Like hanoz says above, what professionals wear is not really comparable to what people wear on the subway these days. It's the cheapest of the cheap Chinese crap, and usually used so long and mishandled that it is becoming really fluffy. Especially now that nobody really cares anymore and the use of them is incidental they end up being lugged around more than worn and not frequently replaced.
A fresh mask doesn't shed a lot but I've seen ones that are all hairy and stringy from being rubbed around in pockets with other stuff. I'm sure they shed a lot more material than a fresh mask.
And a lot of the types you mention would not wear masks like this but powered respirators (e.g. people working in clean rooms)
Personally I have major issues the masks for past medical trauma reasons but I really don't think they are healthy to keep around forever.
>>certain groups (nurses, doctors or certain workers) have to wear a masks all of the time for years
Not really - doctors/nurses etc have for a very long time worn masks for short periods of times, for certain procedures, for certain hours of the day for some days in the week- very few HC professionals have ever had to wear masks continually all day long, day after day and then also for additional chunks of time as they go about their non-work life.
However on the other side: there were some rather poor quality masks produced during the pandemic, so I would not be surprised to see future data about those being linked to health problems.
”Fun” fact: cigarette filters were made with asbestos.
> From 1952 to 1956, Lorillard Tobacco Company's Kent Micronite cigarettes were made with asbestos filters. The filters were advertised as increasing the experience and safety of smoking
