Plastic in the Food Chain and the Expected Pandemic of Cancer?

The world has a persistent plastic pollution problem and despite tremendously societal awareness we state the efforts of the International Scientific Community (ISC) are heavily lagging behind politics and other organizations, which we will substantiate further. On October 12, 2018, President Trump called out other nations, including China and Japan, for “making our oceans into their landfills” when he signed a legislation to improve efforts to clean up plastic trash from the world’s oceans [1]. Also, The European Parliament voted positively October 26, 2018 to approve a measure to ban single-use plastic across the continent which assignment hopefully could be enforced as early as 2021 [1]. This may be the first time in human history concerning ecological problems that politics and social media are at the forefront and the ISC is lagging behind. The accumulation of plastic waste in the oceans is a global, rapidly growing problem. Especially in recent years, much attention has been paid to curb the ongoing flow of plastics and the toxic chemicals they contain into the marine environment. While the world’s population now produces roughly its own weight in plastics per year, which is around 360 billion kilos/year in 2018 with a projection of 500 billion kilos/year in 2025. In addition, it is estimated that more than 280,000 tons of plastic float in the world-oceans. Experts are particularly concerned about the enormous amounts of plastic nanoparticles -estimated by [2] at a minimum of 5.25 trillion particles weighing 268,940 tonsthat are smaller than grains of sand (0.1 microns or less) and are a life-threatening situation. We have indications that plastic pollution is a new ecological problem and ultimately can cause a global increase of cancer cases. The suggested mechanism is the following. The Humboldt Current eastern gyre ecosystem is a highly productive ecosystem. It is the most productive eastern boundary current system. It accounts for roughly 18-20% of the total worldwide marine fish catch. The species are mostly pelagic: sardines, anchovies and jack mackerel. Fish meal is usually made from these cheap pelagic fish species. We hypothesize plastic accumulates in the global five oceanic gyre systems (Figure 1; courtesy 5gyres.org) including the ecological very productive Humboldt Current eastern gyre ecosystem.