It feels like every few weeks i see an article about microplastics being in the human body. As i understand plastics are inert so why do we expect them to be any more harmful than normal dust?
In: Biology
There is a lot of fear and concern about them, as you can see from the many responses on this thread. I am not too concerned yet, for a few reasons.
1) Despite microplastics being ubiquitous, we have little evidence of major health trends at a population level. The comparative analogy is tobacco. Everyone who uses tobacco at a high rate is highly likely to suffer health impacts as a result. We haven’t seen that trend from microplastics yet, despite their ubiquity.
2) We also haven’t seen comparable trends in wildlife, which are being exposed to the same contaminated environment as we are. Many animals have different vulnerabilities to contaminants, but it is noteworthy that there isn’t a massive cancer wave in, say, freshwater fish.
3) Despite the press about microplastics being ubiquitous in the human body in particular, the studies demonstrating this result often do not fully explain their blanks and quality control of their analyses. Most just say that their blanks (if they used any) were clean. They don’t actually provide example data or images supporting that. Given the popular fear around microplastics, along with the extreme publish or perish nature of academia, it is not impossible that some of this is a bit overblown
I’m not going to commit to believing that necessarily, but it does give me pause. As others have noted, the human body (and all animal bodies) are very robust to particulate contamination. We breathe in dust and other particles constantly, and ingest them constantly, and most do not pass through our mucus membranes. The exceptions like asbestos and silicosis occur from the mucus membranes being continually irritated and scarred from physical damage. That certainly could be happening, but I would expect us to be seeing a population-level trend of it by now.
Should we be concerned? Absolutely. Should we reduce plastic use as much as possible? Absolutely. Should we panic that we are all going to die? I’m not certain.
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