Those who work in nursing jobs or homecare jobs will know how serious this can be because sometimes it only takes something very small to affect your health in a serious way. 10,000 pieces of plastic have been found in a litre of tap water alone, and twice as much was also found in branded bottles of water.

These shocking findings have lead WHO to launch a brand new campaign. They are trying to force people to consider the impact that microplastics have on our bodies and that drinking water even contains them. No data is available at the moment to try and link microplastics to health conditions but there is time yet and this could well be the case. In fact, a study has been done and it showed that microplastics have been in fact absorbed into fishes’ brains. This has changed the way that everyone sees these types of plastics. According to the paper that has been published, the tiniest marine plastic pollutions are called nano-plastics and these were found all over the aquatic food chain. When these enter the predator’s brain, it affects their ability to hunt and it also makes it much harder for them.

Researchers have also found that nano-plastics are completely undetectable to the human eye, and pieces were purposely fed to daphnia which is a freshwater zooplankton. The contaminated daphnia was then fed to some carp and they monitored the behaviour of the fish over quite some time. Researchers then found that the fish started acting strangely afterwards.