Microplastics and health: what the evidence actually supports
Exposure is real and universal. One human study links plastics in artery plaque to worse outcomes. No causal harm is established, and the measurements are still maturing.
BPA, 'BPA-free' and the bisphenol question, without the noise
Europe cut its safe intake for BPA by orders of magnitude and banned it in food packaging. US regulators disagree, and the substitutes are less studied.
Microplastics in salt, seafood and tea bags: do the doses matter?
Particles turn up across the food supply, and plastic tea bags shed billions per cup. The counts are real; whether these amounts affect health is unestablished.
Bottled versus tap water and the nanoplastic count
A 2024 imaging method found roughly a quarter-million plastic particles per litre of bottled water, most of them nanoplastics — far more than older counts, and mostly unstudied.
Does heating food in plastic matter? What the release data show
Microwaving food in some plastic containers releases far more particles than cold storage. What that means for health is still an open question of dose.
Michigan reports 6,065 cyclosporiasis cases in an unusually large summer outbreak
An interim report in NEJM Evidence links the parasitic outbreak to iceberg lettuce and one restaurant chain, with cases spread across most of the state.
Where the 'credit card of plastic a week' figure comes from
Five grams a week is the top of a wide range in one 2020 analysis. A mechanistic model put the mass humans actually ingest at micrograms, not grams.
WHO traces a global infant formula contamination to one Chinese oil supplier
Products reached 99 countries before recalls began. WHO's first Disease Outbreak News report on the event lists 144 suspected and confirmed illnesses and calls the risk moderate.