Tires and degrading garbage shed tiny pieces of plastic into the air, creating a form of air pollution that UC San Francisco researchers suspect may be causing respiratory and other illnesses.
Children are suffering and dying from disease that emerging scientific research has linked to chemical exposures, findings that require urgent revamping of laws around the world, according to a new paper published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
A new review of roughly 3,000 studies has found that microplastics could be to blame for contributing to air pollution, respiratory issues, and additional health problems, including cancer and male and female infertility.
It's a disturbing thought: At this very moment, tiny crumbs of plastic are trickling through our bodies, a parade of unwelcome houseguests ready to take up residence in some tissue or organ.
Microscopic plastic particles in the air could be contributing to a wide variety of health problems, including lung and colon cancers.
Tires and degrading garbage shed tiny pieces of plastic which become airborne, creating a form of air pollution that’s not very well understood, a new review says.
People diagnosed with infertility and certain cancers may have to blame the very air they breathe, according to a new report that adds to evidence that tiny plastic particles in air pollution and other environmental sources could be causing these and other diseases and illnesses.
Scientists are calling for the incoming Trump administration to adopt a set of guidelines designed to ensure scientific integrity at federal agencies and loosen corporate influence on regulators charged with protecting Americans’ health.
Environmentalists and academics who have pushed EPA to adopt stringent approaches to TSCA chemical reviews said they are planning to oppose likely rollbacks under the Trump administration by looking to states as “laboratories” for more protective science and conducting “shadow” versions of the agency’s evaluations using their favored standards.
Almost 25 years after federal regulators curbed household use of a pesticide linked to learning disorders in children, and three years after a total ban on its use on food crops, the chemical is again being applied to everything from bananas to turnips in most states.
In a world flush with hazardous air pollutants, there is one that causes far more cancer than any other, one that is so widespread that nobody in the United States is safe from it.
It is a chemical so pervasive that a new analysis by ProPublica found it exposes everyone to elevated risks of developing cancer no matter where they live. And perhaps most worrisome, it often poses the greatest risk in the one place people feel safest: inside their homes.
Chemicals like phthalates and bisphenols in plastics, known as endocrine disrupters — substances in food, personal care products and the environment that can mimic or block hormones and throw the body’s hormones out of kilter — have been linked to an increased risk for metabolic disorders and obesity, said Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco.
Microplastics have been found throughout the human body -- including inside lungs, blood and brains -- and while it is not yet clear how harmful they are to our health, some researchers are sounding the alarm.
Microplastics are everywhere and research has shown that we are becoming more and more exposed to it. So how does it affect our health and what can we do about it? Prof Tracey Woodruff talks about some of the basic things we can do to help ourselves.
It seems every few months, we discover microplastics in a new part of the body. We have found them in our livers, kidneys, lungs and guts. They have even shown up in human breast milk and blood. Last week, they turned up again in eight people’s olfactory bulbs, a brain structure crucial for smell.
A group of academic scientists and clinicians is calling for EPA to strengthen its draft TSCA analyses of a pair of widely used dichloroethane chemicals, charging that the agency is understating their risks and appears to be inconsistently applying its non-cancer risk approach and what it deems unreasonable risk.