breast implants

Today I read that there's an article in Analytical Chemistry that says there are high levels of bad-for-you platinum compound(s?) today in women who got silicone breast implants in the 1980's, many of whom had their implants removed for health reasons.

Ok. The article I read about this article mentions something like three different forms of bad-for-you platinum: platinum salts, some oxidized form, and an unstable form, one or another or all of which (I'm not clear on this) can cause "severe allergies, asthma, nerve damage and reduced immune responses." As a PhD physicist, I can't really tell you much about the different kinds of platinum. I can, however, tell you symptoms of MCS and that when I was in high school, twenty years before I had a clue about MCS, I learned that breast implants caused MCS in some small percentage of the implanted-boob community. Now, you know the only way to make high school kids (even nerds) read the news (not the funnies) is to give them some absurdly contrived newspaper-reading assignment. If I learned it, I would expect you'd have had to sing loudly with your fingers in your ears for several years during the mid-80's to miss it, so this morning, I thought, wow, I guess that's what the problem was.

Then I got a little farther into the article where a silicone industry guy pretty much said 'that can't happen:'

Michael Brook, a chemist and silicone manufacturing expert at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said the new study contained some data and conclusions about platinum that he said were very hard, if not impossible, to accept. He said, for instance, that the researchers reported finding platinum in a highly unstable form never before known to exist in the presence of air or water, as existing in the human body.

What I get out of this statement is that yes, he doesn't see how it's possible, but it's not like they took a survey and announced that they had found red kryptonite in doughnuts; they took samples from people who had implants and analyzed them. Other people can do that, too. If they made stuff up, someone will expose them, and not by saying 'I don't see how that's possible.'

Not like he had any choice in the matter. What was he supposed to say? 'Oh, drat'?