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Comment by agtech_andy | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that US regulatory agencies have been extremely permissive for many years. Many other nations piggy back on their findings. We need a massive increase in enforcement.

What we will see with cheaper and more available testing is that PFAS are everywhere. It is hard to find waterways or soils, even in remote areas, that are not contaminated. It is really tragic and the extent of the pollution can make you crazy.

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It will cause things to move much slower. But I'm thinking we are at the point where we need to move to burden of proof to being safe instead of it being unsafe.

That's the root problem. It's "release first" maybe ask questions later. Imagine if food or drug - which also end up in your body - were done the same way.

But even if individual chemicals are proven to be safe, there's the issue of combining with other chemicals in the wild.

In the case of these containers...I grew up when the local takeout (e.g., Chinese) used paper containers. We survived. These newer "high tech" solutions are silly.

I don't think proof is the right word. It's impossible to prove something is safe.

Of course you can proof the safety of a chemical compound for human consumption (at least to the best of current technical abilities and within an acceptable margin of error). This is done for i.e. drugs thousands of times each year. Yes it costs money and time, but that is about the only serious objection. You could also go to a risk based model, where the burden of proof for groups of chemical compounds shifts based on experience with similar compounds, potential environmental impact, local and global measurements, etc.

Scientists show the safety by searching diligently for unsafety and not finding it.

That's not proof. A ten year drug trial may fail to show problems that take 20 years to surface, but that doesn't mean the drug is safe.

I suspect a lot of these chemicals fall into that hard-to-find-problems category. Only when they are an overwhelming part of our environment for decades or even generations will we start to understand the effects.

So this is not just a matter of money. It's a hard problem.

The FDA approves medical treatments, many of which are chemicals. They approve treatments based largely on how effective it is as treatment. It's safety profile is studied and considered in a broader context. Many drugs approved by the FDA are incredibly blatantly unsafe. The FDA spends non-trival amounts of effort communicating risks associated with chemicals to doctors and patients.

Outside of this example, proving a negative on this scale is a 1000x larger problem than proving there are no leprechauns. No one has proven there are no leprechauns. It is logically possible to prove a negative, but we simply cannot observe all of the places a leprechaun might be hiding at the same time. The best thing we can do is list off all the places we know there are no leprechauns. This is very different than "proof".

You know what I mean

> Many other nations piggy back on their findings.

This is not true at all. The European Union has been the principal regulatory body for the world for a few decades now, with other countries reactively shaping their policies in the wake of EU regulations.

> Many other nations piggy back on their findings. We need a massive increase in enforcement.

I don’t think it as much an enforcement issue as a standards issue - we shouldn’t presume anything is safe without strict standards for the science proving it.

They are permissive because the same people who own stock in the manufacturing industry of these containers and food industries also own stock in healthcare. They make money off of the suffering.

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