If you are thinking about pursuing healthcare jobs in California, you will need a high tolerance for rules, regulations, car theft, taxes, sidewalk poop, tyrannical bureaucracies, the homeless, crime, discarded needles, and screeching liberal harpies. Oh, and hunger-like affection for carcinogens, hypoxia, and microplastics.
Public Health officials in several Left-Coast counties have reinstituted mask mandate, and they are serious (not about science or health, just making some people wear masks).
[Alameda County] warned that any violation of the order’s provision in Alameda County “constitutes an imminent threat and menace to public health, constitutes a public nuisance, and is punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both.”
This feels a bit Ten Commandments-ish coming from your typical bureaucratic secular scientism fanatics. Imminent threat! Menace! These are good words to describe a health department, which must know there is no shortage of research challenging the efficacy of this non-pharmaceutical intervention. The NIH has a paper from Science Direct (recent!) that outlines a litany of harms to humans resulting from prolonged use of medical facemasks. The researchers scoped dozens of papers to compile their data.
24 studies were included (experimental time 17 min to 15 days) evaluating content and/or release in 631 masks (273 surgical, 228 textile and 130 N95 masks). Most studies (63%) showed alarming results with high micro- and nanoplastics (MPs and NPs) release and exceedances could also be evidenced for volatile organic compounds (VOCs), xylene, acrolein, per-/polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), phthalates (including di(2-ethylhexyl)-phthalate, DEHP) and for Pb, Cd, Co, Cu, Sb and TiO2.
Masks may be necessary evils (to keep you from drooling into an open chest cavity, for example), but they are not made to reduce the spread of a virus.
[E]vidence and research link face mask-wearing to other illnesses, including cancer and increased exposure to other pathogens, as well as a wealth of additional research on how they don’t help are bad for you, and now – confirming research similar to what we’ve already published, toxins baked into the mask before you ever put them on.
That same research suggests evidence that medical face masks are introducing micro-and nano-plastics (NPs and MPs) into the environment and into us (and aren’t those currently a big deal to the government to fix the environment crowd?).
Exposure to plastic particles has increased continuously in the modern world (Prata et al., 2019), but the obligations to wear masks around the world during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic 2020–2023 (Face covering policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2023) has increased this exposure even further (Tesfaldet and Ndeh, 2022). Recent environmental studies have reported that plastic-based personal protective equipment (PPE) releases substantial amounts of NPs and MPs, to the environment (De-la-Torre et al., 2021; Fadare and Okoffo, 2020). The NPs and MPs released from face masks were detected even in marine organisms showing their broad distribution (Chen et al., 2021; Khan and Jia, 2023). Once released, these MPs and NPs (MPs, < 5 mm, NPs, < 1 µm) originating from masks pose a delayed indirect environmental health risk to humans regarding oral uptake and inhalation (Du et al., 2022). ..
In the evaluated literature we found a possible maximal release of MPs up to 5390 particles per mask within 24 h (Zuri et al., 2022) and a maximum mass loss of 0.831 mg/N95 mask (particles and fibers) during 24 h (Liang et al., 2022).
Given all we’ve learned since the Wuhan lab leak, I find it challenging to support even voluntary masking. But if you have to do something in the name of public health, shouldn’t you put warning labels on the packaging?
Prolonged use may result in exposure to nano-plastic and known carcinogens and complicate or increase the likelihood of infection from flu and cold viruses.
Unless the point of mask mandates isn’t public health at all (cough-cough).
