How might microplastics be related to cancer risk? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Microplastics you’ve inhaled and eaten are found all over your body, a recent study shows, and while no one knows exactly how they’re impacting your health, odds are they aren’t good for you. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins reviews the data. 

Nelson: They also found a higher level in people had died in 2024 versus people who had died in 2016. The average human being has an intake somewhere on the order of 40-50 thousand microplastic particles per year and they inhale another 35 to 70,000 particles per year. The nano plastics that they saw when they looked at electron microscopy they were almost like shard shaped and they found these things lodged in and around blood vessels. It creates a chronic inflammatory condition in that area and that's what leads to the cancers probably.             :35

Nelson says no one knows at this point how to eliminate microplastics. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.