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Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

There‘s other stuff to pick from, too - lead, mercury, and other metals come to mind for example. Lyme disease, which is now suspected to be transmitted sexually and maybe across the placenta (speculative though that is). Pesticides and herbicides. Radical particulates emitted by cars and industry (have been shown to lower IQ, and who knows what else). Nutrient-depleted soil (eg magnesium and copper), resulting in deficiencies. Iodine deficiency, which is endemic in many western countries. Rampant sugar (even worse: HFCS) consumption, obviously. Increase in food lectins via GMO, endangering gut mucosal barrier function.

The list goes on.

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Yep that shear number of possible confounders is why it is so difficult to draw any sort of clear relationships between any particular pollutant and any particular health outcomes. It's not necessarily always conspiracy by corporations to thwart the research, it's genuinely difficult to study any affect because there's so many confounding pollutant exposures, metabolic pathways, and outcomes.

An interesting question is that would the risk of these outcomes be worth the massive amount of savings and productivity that plastics have had on nearly every industry? Then there's also the use cases where plastics are nearly irreplaceable, or at least not easily replaceable without incurring a huge cost increase for example in medical applications (think packaging for syringes, vaccines, surgical tools, or anything that requires contamination control).

I don’t think any of the irreplaceable uses of plastics are really major contributors to the problem. eg if syringes were the only plastic item around, this would not be an issue simply because there aren’t that many syringes and they aren’t generally reused (and so don’t shed plastics as much as water bottles with tops being screwed on and off frequently). It’s the common, day-to-day plastic items like food containers and synthetic clothes. Those are hardly irreplaceable use cases, although obviously other solutions are going to be more expensive than plastics.

Another issue is that aluminum cans and food packaging is lined with a plastic residue.

It's almost impossible to get away from it. Also plastic bags, clothes shed into the environment and get eaten by fish and animals.

So maybe we all need to be vegetarian.

You're right if we eliminated all non-essential use cases it there would be a lot less microplastics, but even in the cases where it's readily replaceable is the extra expenses in all of those product categories worth it over the highly speculative health concerns? I think cumulatively the expenses can be more drastic than at first glance, for example like think of all the non-essential but extremely common use in items like beauty products, food packaging, electronics, etc.

> Lyme disease, which is now suspected to be transmitted sexually and maybe across the placenta (speculative though that is).

Source? Lyme disease is from ticks.

And the Black Death was from fleas. What are you trying to say? There is speculation around the human-human-transmission vector out there, easy to find via a quick search. As I mentioned, it’s speculative and I haven’t found anything I‘d post here.

rude... Lyme disease is actually part of my life, unlike the black death.

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