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What are the confirmed dangers of micro plastics?

I'll concede that they are everywhere, and they are detectable. What is the established consensus on the harm that they cause?


Cthulhu_
It remains underexplored, but there's many papers released and many studies being done to try and confirm. A big one is hormonal; BPA is a xenoestrogen, emulating the effects of estrogen on human bodies, with studies showing links between it and reduced fertility. There's been ~19000 studies on it so far, most since the 2000s (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=bisphenol+a).

Jump-off points:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics_and_human_health...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Human_safety

Lerc OP
It seems like there are issues with determining what harmful levels are.

The BPA wikipedia article says the primary source of human exposure is from canned food. That seems like it could be solved with a specific fix. It is not stated, but I would assume that the exposure from particles distributed in the environment would be insignificant if there is a known primary source that humans frequently interact with.

EasyMark
And there are so many alternatives and we don't know if they aren't even worse than BPA. Also unless you get bottle water/soda/etc in glass you are gonna get it there too, even aluminum cans are lined with the stuff.
gonzalohm
Infertility, increased risk of cancer. There are a few research papers about those topics

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