And yet here we are with a comment thread of heated debate over a plastics exposure study that's 50 million times greater than realistic exposure levels. When or if a realistic exposure study is done we may find that a plastic cup is more like a transcontinental flight than living near a reactor meltdown. Let's find out before we jump to conclusions either way.
Unrealistically high doses imply absolutely nothing about lower doses.
> Unrealistically high doses imply absolutely nothing about lower doses.
The example they give of nuclear radiation is a clear illustration of how a useful hint can be drawn from the high-level example of harm, a pattern which microplastics might very well follow.
Ionizing radiation is also a great example of something everything on the planet is exposed to all the time and we're fine. So clearly the fact that you'll die standing next to the molten core in Chernobyl does not imply that you'll die from background radiation.
Similarly, showing that an extreme dose of microplastics is harmful does not imply that a normal dose of microplastics is. It might be, but we don't know because we've only tested extreme dosages, apparently.
We also don't know that it works the same way in the body as it does in a test tube.
Sending an astronaut to the center of the Sun and concluding their death is from radiation would be a pretty bad model.
Hitting a person with a car would be a pretty bad model for a fly landing on them.
The first model is bad because the sun is doing more than just exposing them to radiation.
The second model is bad because there's a nonlinear response to force applied to a human body.