The U.S. government is officially entering the fight against microplastics and nanoplastics.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health announced an ambitious $144 million endeavor to systematically measure, research, and eventually remove the toxic particles.
The agency, which sits within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, unveiled STOMP, which stands for Systematic Targeting Of MicroPlastics.
"Today, HHS is taking decisive action to confront microplastics as a growing threat to human health," said Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the news release. "Americans deserve clear answers about how microplastics in their bodies affect their health."
The urgency of this mission is undeniable. Growing research suggests that microplastics are entering the body through food, water, and the air. Researchers are locating them in various regions of the human anatomy, such as the lungs and brain.
While the implications for human health aren't completely clear, scientists are establishing links to cancers, hormone disruption, and other negative health outcomes. That jibes with studies on animals that reveal that microplastics cause disease.
With all this uncertainty, STOMP first aims to answer the burning questions out there.
"Microplastics are in every organ we look at — in ourselves and in our children," ARPA-H Director Alicia Jackson said. "But we don't know which ones are harmful or how to remove them."
The program will roll out in two phases in search of those insights. The first stage focuses on developing an affordable and accurate measuring system that will not only provide reliable testing results, but also allocate risk.
It will also seek to map out where microplastics go in our bodies, how they behave, and what the best interventions are.
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The second stage focuses on removal. It can only work if the first stage uncovers a trove of information about the risk levels of different types of microplastics, where they're found, and where eradication is possible.
If the work is successful, vulnerable groups such as children, people with chronic diseases, and pregnant women will have access to early detection and removal of microplastics.
"It's physically impossible for us to completely divorce our lives from plastics," said ARPA-H Program Manager Shannon Greene. "We need to understand how microplastics are distributed throughout the body and what harm they are causing before we can take the next leap forward."
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