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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

This still sounds concerning to me, if the dose is 2mg for a healthy adult what is it for children and infants? What about babies in the womb?

We saw the same exact thing with PFAS/PFOA, the experts said it was harmless, present in impossibly small quantities, and it would "pass right through you" for literally years. But then it turned out the experts were completely wrong. They found 2000PPM of PFAS in my Mom's well in New Hampshire, out in in the country, miles away from a Teflon factory that leaked into the water supply. She found it after hundreds of dollars of testing when I told her she should be paranoid.

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Also it's not just endocrine disruption. Forever chemicals and microplastics can lodge in muscle and cause accumulated damage as the body tries to encapsulate it to keep from getting injured. And the circulatory system where it can clog arteries/veins/capillaries and cut off circulation. The images in this paper show plastic fibers embedded in fish muscle:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...

Maybe most particles are too large to cross the intestinal lining, but can they prove that's still the case with "leaky gut" which a large number of people in the US are susceptible to due to the missing fiber in our diet? What about worse inflammation like IBS, IBD, Crohn's disease and diverticulitis?

https://nypost.com/2021/12/23/irritable-bowel-syndrome-linke...

We eat a credit card's worth of microplastic every week, mostly coming from our water supply apparently. This is the kind of news whose implications are so serious that it's much easier to just ignore it!

> We eat a credit card's worth of microplastic every week, mostly coming from our water supply apparently

There ia a lot written about this online but they always skim over the detail of how humans actually ingest this.

Do you have any source that explains that the source is mostly via our water supply?

Shoot I can't remember where I read that offhand. I did find this paper:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6449537/

In figure 1, untreated tap water ranked higher than bottled water in plastic particle count per unit volume. They conclude that standardization of micro plastic analysis and more studies are needed.

It's said that we should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, but, the plastics lobby has so much power that suggesting they had nothing to do with our ignorance of this issue is.. laughable at best.

>We eat a credit card's worth of microplastic every week

No, we don't. Here is a 4 minute video explaining how this bit of misinformation came to be spread across the internet. https://youtu.be/2Ntp6BqhSng

Thanks for that, I hadn't seen it, so I'll stop ranting about eating plastic until I see new evidence. Also I'm a big fan of Hank Green, but his proof is still just one data point in a mountain of evidence to the contrary. I feel that microplastics are a symptom of deregulation and lack of enforcement of existing laws, mostly due to the factory farming lobby:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPbF45-ZB5M

For this specific chemical, it actually has been studied since at least 1943[1] and used in a few different medical contexts. That mean it has a leg on some random pollutant never considered for medicinal use.

Does that mean it's great in drinking water? No... but I think we shouldn't just jump from one type of catastrophizing to the next. There's endless questions we can ask to scare ourselves, but maybe it's a better use of our time to point that concern on things which we already know or damaging our kids, like: lead in drinking water, malnutrition, lack of affordable pre school options, etc etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethinylestradiol

2000 PPM is 0.2% or one-in-fivehundred, right? That’s massive pollution. My layman’s logic would suggest you need to dump 0.2% of total aquifer volume of 100% PFAS to reach that level? And then I expect pollution to spread in a semi-sphere unless there are rocky sediments. Edit: thinking more about water, perhaps you can dump less in wetter conditions and then in a drought get higher values because PFAS won’t evaporate. But still, it suggests tons and tons of dumping?

It sounds like the Teflon plant has been dumping their polymerization process water into the environment, much like what happened in Parkersburg, WV.

The forever chemicals like those are absolutely awful.

Fracking is another source of chemicals into water supplies.

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