Many soft contact lenses in US made up of PFAS, research suggests
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Leah found "Indications of PFAS", organic Fluorine, which may or may not be PFAS. Whilst she may not be wrong, as a wearer of contact lenses myself I would like to know the truth.
I hate this kind of garbage research.
Florine can be used in lots of things, without actually checking there is absolutely no way they can claim it's PFAS.
There's been a range of studies that have shown possible links with a number of different diseases which is concerning only because the effects of PFAS had been largely unstudied until the last 15 years. But that this point, there are few clear problems from PFAS.
https://cen.acs.org/environment/persistent-pollutants/Biodeg...
I hope some research is done on PFAs before it’s too late.
Banning the plastic ones was fine, but I'd rather no straw over a coated paper one.
Way ahead of you on that one.
The fact that 3M is exiting their 1.3 billion fluorinated molecule business of their own accord, should give you a flavour of the shitstorm of litigation that will result when the full implications of PFAS contamination are understood more broadly.
https://news.3m.com/2022-12-20-3M-to-Exit-PFAS-Manufacturing...
All of that business will be taken up by other manufacturers in APEC and in aggregate the world will be unhealthier due to less regulation.
all that industrialization brought us to much healthier longer lives filled with amenities undreamed of 100 years ago, including corrective vision.
now as a society we uncover problems, we fix them. We're doing pretty well.
Let me give a concrete example: what would be "responsible" about doing a 10-year FDA trial to approve a novel anti-cancer therapy, for a cancer that currently has no existing treatment?
Even if this novel cancer treatment killed 50% of the people treated, if the rest went into remission, that'd be 50% more people who would be not dead at the end of the treatment, than if there was no treatment. We'd still be better off approving it immediately; and every day we'd delay to be "responsible" would be lives lost that could have been saved!
Obviously, no real technology kills 50% of people while preventing the other 50% from dying of some horrible disease. But real technologies might do things very analogous to this. For example, the Haber-Bosch process. Contributes to global warming; but also enables 10x as many people to have food to eat.
If you don't see how PFAS are an example of this kind of "benefits in lives saved outweigh whatever risk" technology: what chemical do you think is used in the lining of IV tubes to prevent the growth of bacterial biofilms? (This is the likely highest lifetime source of PFAS exposure for the average person. But it's also a necessary one!)
And, in fact, why do you think the contact lenses are using PFAS? Same idea. The benefit (not potentially getting a bacterial eye infection) severely outweighs any potential risk. PFAS in your eye could mean that your eye is slightly — in a way that's hard enough to measure that we haven't yet noticed it in clinical practice — more likely to get [some disease we aren't aware of] over the long term. But putting a contact lens without PFAS in your eye, means that your eye is quite a bit more likely to get infected, and need to be removed, or possibly even transmit an infection right into your brain!
...is the sort of thing the FDA would say, if you had just invented glasses today; before then demanding a 20-year longitudinal cohort study to disprove those possible risks. (They might also list all those same risk factors for wearing a hat.)
My point being — we can come up with all sorts of plausible potential risks of literally any technology, new or old. There are plenty of subtle long-term consequences of our interactions with everyday objects that nobody has ever stopped to consider; anything can potentially be doing esoteric bad things to us.
But if we invented prescription glasses today, and everyone until now had been just walking around nearsighted — bumping into things, unable to legally drive, etc — for lack of them; then should we hold off on allowing them to be sold, until we do such a study? Or should we accept that being able to see outweighs a bunch of entirely-hypothetical risks?
Or, on a related note, how about this: would it have been "responsible" to prevent people from getting laser eye surgery, out of concern that it might make their night vision worse?
re laser eye surgery, there was a story pretty recently about the number of post surgery issues being downplayed and under-represented. If you had a full and true picture of the risks then you might avoid laser eye surgery, but people running laser eye surgery clinics don't want you to have all the information.
Nobody has any idea what to do about Wittenoom, it's screwed for a relative forever as far as human timescales are concerned. PFAS contamination is the same. So many of our mistakes are. We can't fix Chernobyl, the tens of thousands of barrels of DDT at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of California or scores of other atrocities we have committed. This isn't a case of breaking out the dustpan and broom and packing away our toys!
Doing pretty well?
Doubt if the parents of all those severely deformed thalidomide-affected babies, or the babies themselves, would agree:
And yet there were deaths.
So, not only American.
Plus, the article itself says many non-American deaths happened.
> We're doing pretty well.
You know it's interesting to think about who is doing well and who is not thanks to global industrialization. In the last 50 years "we" in the OECD countries simply moved our polluting industry to poor countries, where people have had their ancestral farm land taken by governments and replaced with polluting factories. This has left many of them with few opportunities other than to work in dangerous factories while living and raising their children in toxic wastelands.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
Carbon intensity of GDP, worldwide, fell almost 40% between 1980 and 2021 [1]. (-1.3% CAGR.)
We do offshore toxic industries. But we're also getting better at being less toxic. Environmentalism isn't all a shell game.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/co2-emissions...
I'm certainly thankful we'll have 10 billion people to share that ride with. Misery loves her company.
It's all a monkey paw and we've been standing in place for a century.
Ethanol was absolutely added for profit… but much like HFCS, it was about propping up big agribusiness.
Higher percentages of ethanol are arguably not worthwhile, but getting rid of MBTE is almost certainly the right choice.
It is fat soluble and accumulates through the food chain.
Just kind of amazing.
XML: lots of sticky typing of tags.
We don't yet know what we have wrought with XML, what insidious harms shall come from squished fingers upon rubber-domed keys.
Over and over, the tags!
Opening and closing, the tags!
Verbose yet incomplete,
Wayward schemas in attr equals,
Transforms atop loops and ifs,
Ending yet starting yet ending <starting
Maven, web.xml, SOAP--
Newlines and through lines, blobs in
SQL row lines <!-- comments too
Trees never perish,
Always and ever the roots flourishSo if PFAS has some mechanism to pass through the Bowman's layer, it could be useful for medicine delivery and healing corneal wounds.
The media has successfully stirred up fear on an entire class of compounds that have half-lives ranging over many orders of magnitude.
I wear glasses and contacts, and do sports, and contacts just work a lot better for sports. Glasses are totally fine for sitting at a computer or walking around or driving.
I would stick with contacts but, like this topic suggests, there are legitimate health concerns, and I can’t justify how disposable they are with no consideration of environmental impacts. I wish that wasn’t the case.
Contacts are, as addressed, tiny. The amount of waste you generate from these things is almost nothing. I compared to a plastic bag earlier, but just imagine how much shit is wasted on a single private jet flight. Don't torture yourself when the people in position to enact change don't.
Contacts also have an insane value prop. Vision assistance is more of a need than a want in a modern society where one has to work for money.
If we consider the cases as well, I might need to go up to say, a gallon bottle of milk.
I'm deliberately overestimating here by the way.
What is the waste problem here?
Having something constantly on my face, on my nose, behind my ears, in front of my eyes, so my peripheral vision is constantly a blur, chromatic aberration around the edges, you’ve got to be careful not to smudge or scratch or bump or bend them… plus that heart-stopping moment when something hits you in the face, knocks them off, and suddenly you are BLIND and there’s nothing you can do about it…
I hate wearing glasses.
Vision surgery will correct the central portion of your eyes, and it won't last your lifetime.
After vision surgery, your prescription can continue to change, however it is difficult to correct the vision with contact lenses at that point because your eye has a "plateau" shape, which contacts aren't really designed for.
Also, if there is astigmatism, it's hard to correct it at low diopters of correction.
Naively searching seems to mostly get well SEO'd results from LASIK related companies making claims like "In general, there is no limit on how many LASIK procedures you can get in your lifetime"[0]. Though that is followed by "The thickness of the cornea is one of the main determinations regarding the safety of multiple LASIK surgeries" in the same article which seems to contradict the previous statement as there is clearly a limit before it becomes unsafe to perform another procedure.
Meanwhile on a very short search, I cannot seem to find any study or report about literally anyone having more than two laser eye surgeries.
I did find an FDA guideline from 2022 that lists a surprising number of risks for laser eye surgeries[1].
[0] https://vson.com.au/how-many-times-can-you-have-lasik-eye-su...
[1] Laser-Assisted In Situ Keratomileusis (LASIK) Lasers - Patient Labeling Recommendations (https://www.fda.gov/media/160239/download)
Certainly it is a number 0-many
I know an uncle who has had it twice
I am ineligible for the procedure as my farsightedness is too severe when coupled with a thin portion of my cornea
I would guess the first surgery is generally the most severe and the followups require less material removal, but I think your research is probably more detailed than mine at this point.
I looked into this 12 years ago when I was debating whether I should get LASIK, and the risk seemed minuscule. I'm sure odds of a bad outcome have gone down even more in that time.
If I want to manufacture (or moreso, import) things with all kinds of unknown, untested chemicals, I am free to do as I wish with no supervision.
People used to drink radium water for health benefits and think smoking wasn't a problem. Good science is reevaluating based on gained knowledge then behaving accordingly. Expect gained knowledge to lead to more strict regulation and certification standards.