this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Plastic. Its in your blood ffs
This may be true but I hate the practice of referring to "plastic" as if it's a single substance. It's a bunch of different materials that don't really have that much in common with each other, especially from a health/toxicity standpoint.
For example, people treat it as common sense that "you shouldn't burn plastic" because the smoke is "toxic". For PVC this is totally true, it makes very nasty stuff like dioxin that will poison you. But on the other hand you can burn polyethylene (think milk jug) and it's no more toxic than burning a candle. Definitely way healthier to breath than wood campfire smoke, for example.
There's also such a silly pattern where people learn some chemical might have some effect on the body and suddenly everyone is up in arms about it. For example Bisphenol A in many applications was replaced by the very similar Bisphenol S just so things could be labeled "BPA Free". BPS probably has similar estrogenic effects to BPA.
I'd say the moral of the story is be wary of received wisdom about chemical toxicity from people who aren't chemists.
Have you heard of Dihydrogen monoxide? It literally kills hundreds of thousands of people every single year all over the world, including young children.
You don't hear about it in the news though do you....
I'm confused about how it kills hundreds of thousands of people per year. How, by drowning?
It's an old (early-internet?) joke iirc. And yes, I think that's the answer
Oh shit, I was thinking there was no way that hundreds of thousands of people did from drowning every year, but they actually do.
WHO estimates that every year over 200k people die from drowning
Yea I did my 10 seconds of research before I quoted my number! I could have said '200k' but 'hundreds of thousands' sounds much more dramatic don't you think? Which is the whole point of the Dihydrogen monoxide thing.
Wow, talk about preventable deaths...
According to its Wikipedia page, this joke was first published in 1983! I suspect most people know it from the early 2000's when it made a resurgence again.
What I think it is, is that every single person who ever consumes it, will eventually die. We are also literally dependant on it. If you stop ingesting it for too long, it can also cause you to die... That's how it went around here, at least.
Thatβs my understanding as well, it was a joke about correlation != causation.
Look at all of the related "risks" and add them up. I'm sure that drowning is a small number, but then add in all of the deaths from scalding, acid rain, poisons (that contain water), etc etc and it eventually gets to be a very big number. Probably in the millions
The WHO estimates 236k deaths per year worldwide due to drowning. There's other ways to die to Dihydrogen monoxide other than drowning, so my numbers hold up!
Acid rain has never killed anyone. It can kill plants and destroy farms, so I guess it can kill indirectly by causing famine, but that's about it.