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
Keep in mind that “inert” does not mean harmless. Asbestos is largely “inert,” and it’s the constant irritation and internal inflammation that ends up triggering problems.
We don’t really know enough about what the microplastics do. Maybe some of them do nothing in our bodies. Maybe having them just bounce around inside the cell is enough to damage things inside the cell, causing them to self destruct, or maybe causing some cancers. Maybe some of them break down into shapes that happen to fit into hormone receptors.
So there is worry because we don’t know. If I handed you a beaker of chemicals and said “drink this, it might be fine, but we haven’t really looked into any sort of long term effects yet,” maybe you’d be hesitant to drink it–at the very least, you’d probably want to keep looking for those long term effects, and maybe think about alternatives to drinking it until they are better studied.
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