Some 13,000 chemicals are associated with plastic production, of which only 7,000 or so have been investigated for their health and environmental impacts. Nearly half of those studied have qualities deemed hazardous to human health, but the research—spanning 50 years and thousands of publications—is difficult to navigate. A new research map, produced by Australia’s Minderoo Foundation, brings order to the chaos, indexing the existing research by chemical compound, health outcomes, affected population groups, and geography.
Among the most significant findings is what they didn’t find:
There were no papers examining the health impact of micro and nano plastic exposure in humans, despite the fact that Americans eats or inhales over 70,000 plastic particles a year.Studies on the health impacts of alternative chemicals used to replace dangerous ones, like Bisphenol A, only ramped up years after they were introduced—and they largely demonstrated that alternatives are often just as bad.As seen in the map above, most of the research has been done in rich countries. But the countries which are being exposed the most—low-income countries with poor waste-management infrastructure—are largely ignored.
Helicobacter pylori is a bacteria in the stomachs of about half the world's population. In most people, it lives benignly, but in some, it causes stomach cancer. As Sarah Zhang writes in the Atlantic, scientists are just now beginning to understand why.
