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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

The fact that we can't pin down a strong effect on human health outcomes after decades of exposure should be a relief. We do have in vivo studies, but afaict they don't seem to pan out in human health outcomes.

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> The fact that we can't pin down a strong effect on human health outcomes after decades of exposure should be a relief

What kind of strong effect are you looking for, immediate death?

That fact isn't reassuring to me at all. There's a wide variety of increasingly common health conditions that have an unknown etiology -- ADHD, autism, CFS, IBS, mental illness, obesity, etc.

The fact there isn't an immediately obvious health outcome is worrying because it just as likely has a wide reaching effect on a great many bodily systems, making it difficult or impossible to isolate exact consequences from varying exposure.

> There's a wide variety of increasingly common health conditions that have an unknown etiology -- ADHD, autism, CFS, IBS, mental illness, obesity, etc.

And the number of people named Killian corresponds well with the rise in incidents related to airbags:

https://tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/2599_popularity-...

You don't just get to pull random things that are going up (assuming that they're going up, which you haven't actually shown) and blame them on something else that is ostensibly going up. That doesn't suggest anything. Ever. [1]

That is pretty sus, after all. Oh look, I just made MSCI's stock go up:

https://tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/1639_google-sear...

[1] But hey, waitaminute...violent crime is down since the 1970! Did microplastics do that, or does it only work for bad stuff?

Taking a step back, my point was simply that there's a large number of common ailments that we don't understand. We don't know what causes them and we don't know how to cure them. Our understanding of human biology is grossly incomplete. We are nowhere close to first principles here.

We also have a long history of introducing new compounds into the environment and then many decades later saying oops, turns out those are toxic. BPA and PFAs recently, to name a few.

Where does that leave us? Who knows. I'm not saying microplastics are responsible for any of those diseases. I'm saying we don't really know what the hell is going on, so some alarm and caution seems appropriate. And, call me crazy, I'd say accidentally coating the planet with a new substance isn't a good thing. There is nothing reassuring about this situation.

No no no, you don't get to point at "common ailments" and assume you've explained anything. What common ailments do you think we don't understand, don't know the causes of, or can't cure?

Go to your doctor with eczema and ask what the problem is. They won't know, and sorry there is no cure. Hell go to your doctor with a migraine -- good luck. Have a food allergy? That should be simple to explain and fix, right... well actually we can't.

Maybe we can cure your asthma? Nope. We can't cure your diabetes either, sorry. Type 1? We don't know how you got that.

Better hope you never have any auto-immune disorder or mental illness. Doctors won't be able to explain it or cure it. And hopefully you never got long Covid. Cross your fingers on cancer, alzheimers, and parkinsons.

I could go on but I wonder, isn't our lack of understanding an obvious truth?

> The fact that we can't pin down a strong effect on human health outcomes after decades of exposure should be a relief.

I can't say this means much to me when exposure to plastic has been accelerating that entire time.

Still, I do sincerely appreciate skepticism as a useful part of any dialogue about hypothesized health impacts.

Personally, I don't see an issue with avoiding consumer-grade plastic except when necessary.

In the last century the landscape of human health problems has pretty drastically shifted (more cancers, more obesity, more asthma, perhaps more mental illness, lower rates of maiming, less malaria and consumption deaths, and frankly this is all just deaths, which is not the only kind of health outcome we care about) so the fact that we can't suss out all the cause and effect from every factor and every outcome is neither surprising nor an argument against it being alarming any time a novel foreign substance can penetrate cell membranes and readily bioaccumulates

Like we study mechanisms for a reason. "Little things get into all your cells" isn't a specific causal argument for specific health outcomes, but it's reasonable to assume it might do something undesirable based on what we know about how cells work and other cases like it. Also, the intervention space is pretty large and some scaling back on plastic usage from the current levels would not be some crazy obvious harm either

Also, "we haven't found effects yet" is especially troublesome in a case where the contaminant in question is a cash cow for an industry that has continuously spent more money than I can even meaningfully reason about suppressing science and muddying discourse about products they sell. Sowing doubt has been an explicit strategy of the petroleum industry for greenhouse effects and it took a long time for us to even definitively know that, so now that we do, why should I assume the same companies aren't taking the same approach for this problem? Again, it feels like isolated demands for rigor

It's not important how "relieved" you feel, it is important that we exercise scientific rigor when we notice something like this. I don't want scientists to look at the lack of evidence of harm, and just breathe a sigh of relief and carry on with other studies. I want scientists to see the overwhelming microplastic problem, and exhaustively study the risks, and harms, and the solutions.

I see no benefit in hand waving away a potentially serious public health problem just because you aren't seeing any anecdotal evidence of harm.

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