I'm Dr. Nicole Sapphire, and this is your weekly rundown.

Let's dive into the top three stories making waves right now.

The first one, a glimmer of hope in the battle against microplastics.

New research out of China suggests that certain gut bacteria,

specifically a strain of bifidobacterium, may be able to

actually break down the microplastics inside our body. Yep, you heard that right. Maybe the key

to ridding microplastics is how healthy and active our gut bacteria are. Microplastics, they're

found in our water, our food, even in the air, and they have been linked to bodily inflammation, hormone disruption, and even cancer risk.

But these newly discovered bacterial strains seem capable of degrading small plastic particles, well, at least in lab models.

Now, it's early days, and this hasn't been tested

widely in humans, but if future probiotic therapies could help detox the body from plastic

exposure, that would be a game changer. For now, we have to continue minimizing our plastic

use, especially in our food packaging, and we need to make sure we're focusing

on our gut health with fiber-rich food, whole-food diets, prebiotics, and probiotics.

Next up, an explosive claim from HHS Secretary, RFK Jr.

On the Tucker Carlson podcast, RFK Jr. allege that the CDC is actively hiding vaccine

safety data, including potential links between the hepatitis B vaccine and autism, citing an

apparent 1135% increase in autism among certain vaccinated infants. Now, this figure that he cited is based on his

own interpretation of an old study that wasn't even peer-reviewed, and he accused the CDC of

cherry-picking the cohorts or the people that were included in the study. Now, it's worth stating

clearly the current consensus based on massive amounts of peer-reviewed finalized data is that vaccines do not cause autism.

So his comments are inciting frustration among the scientific community because the very thing he's accusing the CDC of doing, not being wholly transparent with data, he made

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