• I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    AFAIK, still no conclusive studies that show microplastics having an overly adverse affect on the human body. I’ve seen one linking it to lower sperm counts, but that’s not particularly bad to me. We don’t need more people.

    The big scare with microplastics is that they are everywhere and that certainly isn’t good; and I think we’re all just waiting for the shoe to drop and some study to come out that shows something majorly negative with them. But for now, there’s nothing obvious sticking out that shows an immediate concern. Which makes sense. We use plastic for so much because it tends not to react to stuff.

    • Alaknár@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      AFAIK, still no conclusive studies that show microplastics having an overly adverse affect on the human body

      The problem is that we’ll never know because there’s no control group. Everybody has them, even fetuses still in the womb. You would have to build bunkers with perfect air filtering, and then go through, like, four generations of humans to breed microplastics-free specimen, which you could then use a the control group for the rest… Only them never leaving the bunker would already invalidate the tests… So, yeah…

      • 1dalm@lemmy.today
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        2 months ago

        If micro plastics were a problem then we should expect to see rapid increases in cancers in younger adults.

        Handed a note

        Huh. No shit.

    • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      We haven’t noticed much in the way of short term effects, but there’s no way to know what long term effects there will be except to wait.

      In the meantime, since the effects are… unlikely to be beneficial, the best thing to do is reduce exposure as much as possible.

    • Rooster326@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      Because they are so ubiquitous that it is impossible to find a control group. Quite literally every single person on the planet has micro plastics in them.