alt Hacker NewsHealth concerns are important - which is why the PP knowledgebase and PP workshops include quite a few infos about the safety aspects of different plastics and how to work with them.
The laser cutter is not necessarily a good comparison for safety considerations. By definition, a laser cutter burns the materials it cuts. With equipment that melts plastic - like injection molding machines or FDM 3D printers - burning the material just means that you did it wrong, your temperature was too high - and you will not get a useful product.
What people do on their own is another matter - but hey, that's apparently just human (see all the chainsaw heroes in safety flip flops, the people running SLA printers in their dorm room, all the soldering that goes on without a fan/filtration, ...)
You're fully right of course. I used plastic materials to make rapid prototypes for lab-on-a-chip purposes. We laser-burned channels in PMMA and laminated it to foils. PMMA behaves very poorly with any solvent, so we started exploring other polymers, and then you run into this issue... I remember PP (poly-propylene) being a very good, inert, non-problematic polymer btw.