These chemicals accumulate over long periods of time in you body, reaching ever higher levels. They are silent killers. But, isn't a large part of the scandal that these companies knew for decades from their own studies there was a huge concern about health safety for employees and the environment? They never shared the alarming results to any authorities. So, they themselves knew very well about detrimental effects decades before they were discovered independently by academic research leading to revised standards and law.
You think that ''chemicals that your body cant dispose of is a bad thing'' is an extraordinarily claim? Do you also still drink water from lead pipes, and huff a piece of asbestos every day?
They are toxic because your body can't deal with them, microplastics are -maybe counterintuitively- still large enough to only cause smaller issues like indigestion. For the problems with pfas, read any source from the rest of this thread.
In the end if your body could get rid of X, X generally isn't a problem. Sometimes it's chemical (i.e. lead/carbonmonoxide/etc) sometimes it's physical (i.e. asbestos/microplastics), accumulating enough of anything not meant to be processed/disposed in your body will be a problem.
I thought the detrimental effects of pfas on immunity was accepted fact by now? Even the mechanism of toxicity is well understood. Surely, we can agree that you don't need instant dead effects to establish a compound to be accepted as detrimental for your health? And not only your health, but that of your offspring as well. The internal documents of 3m and Dupont actually acknowledge as much. That's what the actual outrage is about, they already knew for decades, then tried to hide it because liability costs.
By which I merely meant, "you don't drop dead, like arsenic poisoning". But that makes them even more dangerous imo. All seems fine, while they accumulate in the evenvironment, foods, people, their offspring,... And when the disastrous effects slowly manifest themselves we already have epidemic levels of impact radious. But, I accept you point.
Not in the sense that it accumulates in your body (concentration keeps increasing over time). Water is in steady state with your body, its concentration over time is practically constant.
