6 ms·
So you’re correct in saying you’d need more information to draw conclusions, but the big concern at this point in time is that we really have no idea what impac
by headmelted 6y ago
So you’re correct in saying you’d need more information to draw conclusions, but the big concern at this point in time is that we really have no idea what impact this has. This is potentially much worse than eating a bunch of plastic one time that you’ll ultimately pass right on through (given that these are microscopic particulates in the digestive tract).
In essence the big concern here is cancer. We know that particulates at or around 0.3 microns (the Most Penetrating Particle Size) have been linked to a variety of abdominal cancers in humans throughout the last hundred years.
Critically, these types of cancers can take up to 50 years to form and cause serious enough problems to be detected (and seldom less than a couple of decades), so although billions of people have consumed micro-plastics, we still have no way of knowing what impact that will have on their health in later years.
This is exactly what happened in the case of asbestos - it took so long for the consequences to show up after exposure that it seemed far-fetched to draw a correlation between asbestos and the cancers it caused. When coupled with cover-ups of the evidence by mining companies, the common use of asbestos skyrocketed long after it was known how deadly it was in private - but before public awareness had sounded alarm bells.
The worry is that accumulated micro-plastics could be deadly in later life, but that we don’t find that out until hundreds of millions of people have become terminally ill.
- littlestymaar 6y agoThe example of asbestos is interesting, because it was actually know since the roman empire that it was toxic. Juvenal wrote about the disease suffered by asbestos miners in the beginning of the 2nd century! As you mentioned, the problem is never knowledge: it's the political fact between wealthy corporations and people's interest. Companies try to cover their mess up for as long as they can, by every possible mean. They know it won't last forever, but it doesn't really matter since they banked up their profits in the meantime and people in charge almost never suffer legal consequences for their actions…
- tutfbhuf 6y ago> The worry is that accumulated micro-plastics could be deadly in later life, but that we don’t find that out until hundreds of millions of people have become terminally ill. But even if this scenario were to happen, is there anything we can do about it? Maybe it is already too late and we can only analyze what we could have made better, not what we can.
- germinalphrase 6y agoIt is certainly establishes an obligation to be good ancestors.
- scoot_718 6y agoAlready fucked up there.
- germinalphrase 6y agoThe time is always now.
- nemacol 6y agoA society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
- irjustin 6y agoCurrently, I don't like the comparison to asbestos. Asbestos was known early to be bad. Early mining towns lives were shorter[0]. Information was slow to communicate and I 100% agree there was a lot of money to keep the dangers from being known by the general public. But asbestos, has a long and clear history of being bad. Plastics are no where near as bad and are pretty much ubiquitous. I think the opioid crisis or even sugar is more closely related to asbestos's style of danger combined with misinformation. As this whole thread is discussing, the jury is still out, but there seems to be hardly the study that can point to an asbestos level problem. If we all start developing cancer in about 20 years, I'll be the first to raise my hand admitting I didn't see that coming. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#Discovery_of_toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#Discovery_of_toxicity
- headmelted 6y agoI actually agree with you in part - if this were anything like as bad as asbestos per capita surely we would know that by now. The point I was trying to make was that so very many people, essentially everyone, are being exposed to micro-plastics that even if this were several orders of magnitude less toxic than asbestos that's still a major health crisis. That and as you've said we just don't know what we don't know really.
- conistonwater 6y agoI don't disagree, but 50 years is a very unintuitive number to give because it makes it sound like you're going to die of natural causes before the cancer causes you harm, which is pretty harmless as cancers go.
- headmelted 6y agoNot if you die at 50. Or 40.