#934 Plastic Hormones

A while back I read another article about the dangers of plastic leaching into our bodies. One of the issues surrounding plastic is that breakdown products may be mimicking our sex hormones and causing health issues leading to infertility. Some of the plastic derivatives act in our system like the female hormone estrogen.
The article I read recently was pretty fatalistic. It recommended to science labs that they may want to stop using hard plastic beakers and test tubes. Especially if they heat those things, as contaminates may be getting into delicate experiments.
Reminded me of all the rat experiments that determined that some substances were carcinogenic, when the largest cancer risk the rats faced was the breakdown of the rubber stoppers in their rat cage water bottles.
But when you stop to think about it, if plastic is causing infertility, we’d better evolve quick because eliminating plastics from our society may take longer than a fortuitous genetic mutation making the next generation immune from it.
There’s plastic all through the medical world—test tubes, beakers, pipettes. Or how about IV tubes? Soft plastic. How about the bags in which they store blood? There’s a great way to mainline estrogen mimickers.
“I don’t know Honey, a couple of blood transfusions and suddenly I’m infertile, and I seem to need a bra.”
Of course, household plastics are even more ubiquitous. BPA is found in a place you’d least expect. The lining of some metal cans. That’s right, those cans of food we keep taking to the food bank? They’re lined with estrogen mimicking plastic.
What an insidious way to sterilize the poor.
Or how about plastic drinking straws? I’d start drinking directly from the glass if I were you. You know, every little bit of plastic avoidance helps. And make sure the water you drink without a straw comes straight from the tap. Who knows what plastic breakdown chemicals are leaching into your water filter?
Who’d have thought you’d get infertility from filtered water.
Maybe that guy in the movie The Graduate did have the answer. At least to overpopulation.
Plastics!
America, ya gotta love it.