Cancer Rates in Young People, Air Fresheners, and Microplastic Mayhem

Cancer rates among young people are up 80%—why?

The BBC World Service recently released a podcast on rising cancer rates among young people (and young women in particular), which have climbed by almost 80% in three decades, according to the piece.

Cancers in younger patients (defined as those under 50) tend to be diagnosed at later stages—in part because doctors simply aren’t looking for them as much in younger demographics, but also because, as the interviewee notes, the cancers themselves are often actually more aggressive.

Cancers most notably increasing in prevalence among the young include colorectal, breast, and prostate cancer, and the trend is observed mainly in high-income countries like the UK and USA.

The journalist being interviewed stresses that much more research is needed before we can draw any conclusions and highlights that the cause will certainly be multifactorial; there won’t be a single reason behind the increase. But he does propose rising levels of obesity in young people, artificial light disrupting our sleep, poor sleep quality generally, and the overuse of antibiotics as prime suspects (which isn’t unreasonable).

However, for our purposes, it’s interesting that there was no mention of the possible role of environmental pollutants and endocrine-disrupting chemicals anywhere in the conversation—though, notably, the comments section was full of viewers questioning and wondering why this omission was made.

Of course, there’s no way to know, at this stage, whether toxic-chemical exposure is, at least in part, to blame for the rising incidence of cancer among young people. Anyone proposing such a hypothesis would also have to explain why cancer rates are increasing among the young in particular, given that presumably one’s age shouldn’t significantly affect the degree to which they come into contact with the hidden hazards of everyday life.

That said, seeing as, at present, all proposals are speculative, it seems somewhat negligent not to include environmental toxins in the list of possible culprits. What’s more, there are plausible explanations for the puzzle of why the ever-increasing pervasiveness of hidden hazards might be affecting people of different ages in different ways. For instance, perhaps it matters more than we might imagine what our level of exposure is during our early years, and the young people of today may have been subjected to a far higher toxic load (or a more pernicious combination of pollutants) as babies and infants than older generations were at the same stage in their lives. It could also be that, for example, young people tend to develop certain cancers at higher rates anyway (for whatever reasons), and that some cancers are more strongly linked to toxin exposure—and there could be some overlap between these two categories.

Air fresheners destroy indoor air quality

This article reports on new research showing that air fresheners (along with other chemical products like floor cleaners, deodorants, and wax melts) release nanoscale particles that permeate through our indoor environments and deep into our lungs. The same researchers also found that cooking on a gas stove significantly contributes to indoor nanoparticle pollution—along with all the health risks that entails.

That air fresheners are such potent air pollutants is so obviously ironic that it scarcely needs pointing out. Here we see as big a testament as we’re ever likely to see to the power of marketing and mindless consumerism: we’ve somehow been convinced, en masse, that the most effective means of improving the freshness of indoor air isn’t to remove anything that might be contaminating it or contemplate how we might better ventilate our homes, but to do none of these things and instead simply add more chemicals of dubious safety to the mix and consider the problem solved. Air fresheners are a ubiquitous and harmful product of our impulse to improve the world through addition when subtraction is what’s most called for.

Recent research on microplastics

Tea: a potent source of microplastics

A study published in Food Chemistry found that tea, most significantly tea bags, is a major source of microplastics and nanoplastics (MNPs). Plastic tea bags contain extremely high levels of MNPs—up to a billion (or more) particles per bag. And unfortunately, tea bags marketed as biodegradable aren’t necessarily much better (and many actually contained plastic anyway, blurring the distinction).

Further, it wasn’t just tea bags that were found to be bursting with microplastics but also the tea itself and the packaging materials. And it wasn’t only MNPs the researchers found in tea; other hidden hazards such as phthalates and BPA were also detected.

As a general rule, exposing anything to heat will always cause a much greater release of toxic substances, making boiled tea an ultimately unsurprising addition to the blacklist. If you have the option not to heat plastics or plastic-containing materials, try to avoid doing so.

Microplastics are accumulating in our brains—and linked to dementia

A study published in Nature Medicine, among other terrifying discoveries, found that microplastics seem to accumulate in the brain at a higher rate than in other organs and that, especially worryingly, samples taken from the brains of people who’d died with dementia exhibited much higher concentrations of microplastics and nanoplastics than samples taken from healthy brains (though a causal link hasn’t been established).

Climate change exacerbates microplastic pollution

The collaboration no one’s been waiting for: another study details how climate change amplifies microplastic pollution—by melting glaciers that release trapped microplastics into oceans, disrupting ocean currents and spreading plastic pollution to previously untouched regions, and driving floods that contaminate freshwater sources.

We see here a component or manifestation of what some call the polycrisis: given how they interact with one another, global challenges can become more than the sum of their parts. Climate change and microplastic pollution on their own would be bad enough, but the fact that they exist simultaneously—and that they amplify one another—makes both problems worse.

The study looked at how climate change exacerbates microplastic pollution, but there may also be ways of completing the feedback cycle by thinking about how microplastic pollution could, in turn, worsen climate change. For example, more microplastics in our bodies could cause health issues and therefore increase demand on energy-hungry healthcare systems. Microplastics might also contaminate soil and water, making agriculture trickier—not worsening climate change per se but contributing to problems that climate change is also causing or intensifying.