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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

Initial data says they're at least bad for sea life. Doubtful it's good to have such durable micro materials bouncing around our lungs and digestive tracts. Stopping pollution is also much easier than cleaning up after the fact.

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

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> Doubtful it's good to have such durable micro materials bouncing around our lungs and digestive tracts.

Having odd things in your lungs is bad. Having things bouncing around in your digestive tract means nothing. The whole point of the digestive tract is that you put untrusted materials into it.

As long as it actually makes it out the other end. Bits of undigestable matter the size of smoke particles is a relatively new phenomenon.

Uh, smoke particles and mineral dusts are generally non digestible - and we’ve been eating smoked/cooked meats and slightly dirty things for at least as long as recorded history?

isnt smoked/charred food associated with colon cancer?

Many of the chemicals in smoke particles cause cancer with extended contact.

But not new. At all.

Yes.

And the last decades we’ve had a new unknown cause of colon cancer increase in young adults.

My money is on plastics, but will be hard to prove.

There's growing evidence, especially in the past few years with better studies, that suggests HPV is a significant driver, if not the most significant driver, of the increase in colorectal cancer among younger adults. I suspect it's been a disfavored explanation because of certain implications--implications which should be irrelevant and not even necessarily true, but I digress. The HPV vaccine should in theory be protective[1] so in the next decade or so it might become more clear even in the absence of additional direct investigation. Likewise, we should expect the incidence of oropharyngeal cancers to decrease, which probably not coincidentally has also risen among younger--20-50yo--adults. Notably, the HPV link is more clearly established.

[1] HPV16 and HPV18 being the variants most often identified in HPV-associated colorectal cancers[2], and which are targeted by HPV vaccines as they're the variants primarily responsible for cervical and anal cancers.

[2] See, e.g., https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1479314/ and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9610003/

Very interesting!

Perhaps inappropriate to ask, but are you thinking the implication is anal sex, or the ‘eating ass’ cultural element, or something else?

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