Despite the obviously charged assertion the authors make, I believe this is a good topic to discuss now that the weight of the pandemic is complete. You don't change emergency management plans in the middle of an emergency. We can and should question our approaches, extracting global principles that can be used next time this happens. Similar topics we should rigorously evaluate include FDA and CDC policies, but those are outside scope of the article.<p>I respect the authors' asking the question, but think their narrative is a bit weak / not tied down sufficiently to make a strong claim based solely on literature review.<p>For example: they raise the question of increases in stillborn births and then cite a 3X increase in stillbirths among studied women versus the population rate. Without additional facts, that looks potentially damning to mask wearing during a pandemic driven by a respiratory virus. What is less clear is how the accounting for observed versus actual is performed. Similar to crime statistics, the count of incidence is biased by several positive and negative factors, and stillbirths are not always captured. What _was_ observed was a significant increase in stillbirths due to COVID-19 (especially the Delta variant, which to be fair the authors mention).
Someone can correct me, but is this paper really making the claim that wearing masks a contributing factor to stillbirth rates in Asia?<p>>Other cultures have been wearing face masks long before COVID [[157]]. The prepandemic face mask wearing habits of such countries are not comparable to the pandemic face mask wearing requirements, but scientific data supports our hypotheses from sections 4.1. and. 4.2. Even before the pandemic, in Asia the stillbirth rates have been significantly higher compared to e.g. Eurasia, Oceania or North Africa<p>Also, the authors don't explain how pre-pandemic mask wearing is different than pandemic mask wearing.
The toxicity of chronic exposure to elevated CO2 levels has long been a topic of interest related to climate change for the reason that we could plausibly reach levels of clinical significance over the next 100 years. Interesting to see it arise in a different context.
> Nor is it the first time the authors of the review have claimed face masks could have harmful effects. Several of the authors speculated in [OP ARTICLE] that masks might have caused stillbirths and other health issues. But this was an extrapolation based on studies exposing animals to carbon dioxide — and ignored the fact that masks don’t increase levels of the gas in humans in any clinically meaningful way. The Daily Mail nevertheless covered the paper in a story with an alarming headline, screenshots of which have been widely shared on social media.<p><a href="https://www.factcheck.org/2023/04/scicheck-masking-has-minimal-effects-on-respiratory-system-does-not-cause-long-covid/" rel="nofollow">https://www.factcheck.org/2023/04/scicheck-masking-has-minim...</a>
I had a more thoughtful and charitable post written up, but I reconsidered. What I have instead now is: if you're gonna say not even medical staff like surgeons should wear masks and that they're responsible for millions of stillbirths, you gotta do better than a survey of iffy CO2 levels under mask experiments and some hysterics about submarine CO2 levels. You need to measure blood levels. Like, if I were a researcher who wanted to get onto conservative media, this is the paper I'd write.
One of the things I wonder about is the microplastic fibers ending up in our lungs.<p>Sure, medical professionals have been wearing them for years. But they haven't been reusing the same mask for days, crumpled up in pockets and disintegrated to the point of getting fluffy.<p>I wonder what that will do for long-term health effects. But I guess at that time there was no time to factor that in as any results of long term research would have come after the pandemic anyway.
I mean, if this is true, we have to quickly prevent gas stove as well as gas and oil heating to be added to home units. We also have to say to women to avoid barbecue afternoon when pregnant.
3% CO2 from mask wearing? I doubt it. I recently needed to measure 5% CO2, and I had to hold my breath to near-passout levels to reach 5% on the monitor. There’s no way that I could tolerate 3% for any length of time.<p>More likely these authors cherry-picked studies with typos in them.
<i>There is a possible negative impact risk by imposing extended mask mandates especially for vulnerable subgroups. Circumstantial evidence exists that extended mask use may be related to current observations of stillbirths and to reduced verbal motor and overall cognitive performance in children born during the pandemic. A need exists to reconsider mask mandates.</i>
Even with no mandate, masks alongside other factors, helped reduce COVID infection rates and mortality in Japan [1]. Meanwhile, this article is grasping for a mechanism of toxicity when no epidemiological evidence of toxicity exists, and masks are used occupationally by millions of workers daily.<p>There is evidence from a dedicated infectious disease hospital that elastomeric masks prevent transmission of illness:<p>—In a dedicated TB hospital, they have used elastomeric half-face respirators with N95 filter cartridges since 1995. The filters only need to be changed once per year.<p>—Before implementing these filters, they only used surgical masks that resulted in up to 50% of their staff becoming TST positive and 1-2% with TB disease.<p>—Since they started using the half-face respirators, they have not had a single TST conversion.<p>With a plausible mechanism (filtration), no evidence of harm, and some evidence of benefit with certain forms of masking, maybe what is really needed is a risk:benefit calculation. An essentially no-risk intervention plausibly reduces infection risk and all of a sudden the bar of evidence to practice basic hygiene ratchets up to randomized phase 3 studies. Meanwhile, the same people will cite this preclinical, speculative, provocation of a paper and say masking is murder.<p>Maybe there is something deeper behind this? People don’t like government mandates and don’t want to be told what to do in general. Individualism in contrast with the collectivist self-perception that is more pervasive in Japan may be a more important factor than evidence here. This observation will anger people because they want to believe their decisions are based on evidence, when they are really driven by psychology.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/982234" rel="nofollow">https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/982234</a><p>[2] <a href="https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25275/reusable-elastomeric-respirators-in-health-care-considerations-for-routine-and" rel="nofollow">https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25275/reusable-ela...</a> (pages 106 to 107)