[myrmidon]

Very simplified-- looking at incidents over time is a good sanity check.

If you expect microplastics to cause problems with blood flow in brains, you would expect stroke rates to go up with "microplastics exposure".

But they don't; so either the effect is nonexistent, small enough to be drowned by noise or completely compensated by another product of progress, and, frankly, all those scenarios sound rather unconcerning to me compared to well known environmental problems (e.g. atmospheric CO2).

You are absolutely right that there are a plethora of other negative effects to look at, but I will trust the young scientists yearning for a Nature publication to do their job, and will focus my political vote and personal efforts on know big problems until science shows this to be one as well.