Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the first clear correlation I’ve seen between microplastics and any health issues. I’ve seen lots of guesses and assumptions about how they must be bad for us, but I’ve not seen anything like this. And of course, this is just a correlation so far. Causation hasn’t been proved.

Have I missed others?

View on HN

Experiments with human cells and mice have shown oxidative stress, neurotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, carcinogencity, and altered metabolism.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10151227/

If you ask me, plastic is the new lead.

All my food interacts with plastic. I can go to Rainbow Grocery, and they are just doing me the favor of disposing of the plastic packaging somewhere else in the supply chain.

Much plastic dust in my environment is from car tires.

Both my neighbors solve problems with their roofs with disintegrating, $50 plastic tarps from Home Depot, filling my back yard with plastic. Multi million dollar homes in San Francisco!

What am I really supposed to do? Speaking of lead, it's not like the city has forced anyone to replace the exterior lead paint or lead pipes.

You are right, but if it's lead, it's bad news. The problem isn't that pollution is unknown, the problem is that the middle-aged members of my community, maybe every community, fucking suck as soon as something costs them a fucking dime.

the middle-aged members of my community

There's no need for prejudice, be it skin colour or age. Cheap and corner cutting exists across the entire spectrum of humanity.

Cheap and cutting corners might be better described as externalizing costs. As we know increasing shareholer value trumps all. That being said our civilization would have to roll back to something like the 1800s level of technology. I'm not advocating for this, medicine and transportation can not exist without plastic, but our clothing furniture and rugs and other items don't have to be. And plastic recycling doesn't have to be a joke. But we can't expect shareholders to interalize those costs and not get as rich as fast as possible, can we? After all it will be someone else who will be affected by the wanton distraction of the environment.

Have you talked to your neighbors and offered to cover the cost of replacing their roofs, so they no longer need to use those tarps that are causing you problems? It shouldn't be that much of a financial burden on you if it'd only cost a "dime" or two to fix the problem properly.

To be fair, if you poke a cell with sugars, amino acids, vitamin C, and all sorts of other essential nutrients you'll also see signs of oxidative stress, neurotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, carcinogenicity, and altered metabolism. In some ways it's the counterpart of "bullets cure cancer in a petri dish."

Plastics are still probably bad (with a prior that most synthetic chemicals we're exposed to are known to be toxic and not "proven" to be so and actually banned for 20-100 years), but a cellular study showing that plastics damage those cells isn't very convincing on its own.

Your linked study is a little broader, but it mostly summarizes studies with grandiose ideas or those summarizing those sorts of "poke a cell and find it doesn't like being poked" experiments I initially derided.

Do you think the people who performed the studies didn't think of that?

Do you think that everyone who ever released a "bullets cure cancer in a petri dish" study didn't think of that?

Whether or not they did, it's still a necessary part of the discussion.

They probably did think of that, and they did it too: Science as it is practiced in the real world. This sort of stuff is related to our whining about replication crises, careerism, etc.

But it can have its utility too, it's just more "defense from morons" instead "advancing the field". Or more neutrally filling in very predictable gaps in knowledge, like if you got something really unexpected but this stuff is all bog standard unhappy cells

It's worse than lead. Our planet has irreversiblely been polluted at so many levels of the food chain that it will be a wonder how future humans will figure out how to clean it all up. I'm convinced that at this point we have signed every lifeform up for an evolutionary pressure, and future generations will likely be selected for their resistance to whatever collection of illnesses are ultimately linked to microplastics.

Two months ago: An analysis of artery-clogging plaques in 257 patients found that the presence of these microplastics was associated with a roughly quadrupled risk of heart attack, stroke or death, researchers report March 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/microplastics-nanoplasti...

Some examples off the top of my head:

- Many plastics contain known endocrine disrupters like BPA that have been shown to get into people's bodies and correlate with negative health impacts such as certain cancers, sex organ abnormalities and infertility

- Microplastics can damage cardiovascular tissue and correlate with heart attack, stroke and premature death.

- Microplastics correlate with infertility in men.

- Microplastics absorb heavy metals in the environment and can then transport them into the food chain. Heavy metals of course having many established negative health impacts.

These are just some examples, a quick search should get you many more (along with the sources on the above).

Hannah Ritchie, of OurWorldinData, has a new book and looks at various problems from a data/science perspective.

Her take on microplastics was that there wasn't currently enough science on this to state there was a problem big enough to outweigh the benefits of plastics, but that we should probably be doing that science so we can be sure either way.

I saw different guys die from a piano falling on their head a couple of times, and there are some studies guessing or hinting at the 500kg piano affecting their health, but I'm not sure the piano falling on them caused their death. Could just be a correlation, which as we all know is not causation, maybe it was what they ate that die or something. Piano falling sounds benign after all, so unless we have 100% settled science on the matter, let's not jump into worrying!

Fortunately, microplastics seem to be more like dihydrogen monoxide. Great many studies show how DHMO is toxic and dangerous at both cellular and macro levels. This is a problem, because DHMO is even more ubiquitous in the environment than microplastics. There's kilograms of it in you and me right now!

Yeah, microplastics, an industrial byproduct, are totally like dihydrogen monoxide, something essential for life, which we and all other species, evolved for billions of years to need for basic functioning.

I mean, this kind of thoughtless rooting for any tech and tech byproductto the level of this comparison, similar to the chavinistic "my country, right or wrong" , is like those who were consuming radioactive stuff in the early 20th century to prove "it's completely safe".

and "any tech is always good" is about as much scientific as flat-earth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com