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Comment by pdabbadabba | Hacker News Reader

An honest, basic question for HNers who are much more knowledgeable about this than I am: How much should I care about this? I hear a lot of talk about "forever chemicals" in the news, but I have no idea what the literature really says about what these chemicals are and whether/why I should be worried about them.

My prior here is that human-made industrial chemicals are probably not things I want in my water. But that's about as far as I'm able to go here without a prohibitive amount of research.

Edit: As others here have pointed out, it would also be great to know what, if anything, an individual can do about this contamination.

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Concentration is usually the biggest concern- "the dose makes the poison", so to speak.

Unfortunately, the "forever" moniker is earned because these chemicals don't readily break down. Bio-accumulation is inevitable, which makes it that much harder to determine what a "safe" level of exposure is.

Even so, I don't think the jury is out yet on what the effects of exposure to many of them even are, though several seem to influence hormone levels at least.

> Even so, I don't think the jury is out yet

Just FYI, I believe that you mean "I think the jury is still out..."

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the+jury+is+out

Hmm, I suppose that the jury isn't out yet would imply that the trial is ongoing.

I appreciate the defense, but idioms are not something I am great at, and definitely goofed this one.

As an individual, you can donate blood regularly. There was a study done that found that repeated whole blood or plasma donations were both effective at reducing PFAS levels over time.

That is fascinating. Is that true of toxins that accumulate in the body generally, or specific known classes?

It never occurred to me that blood removal would be an effective method, but there is a certain logic to it. Although it also seems like you'd have to do it an awful number of times to make a difference.

Is that true of toxins that accumulate in the body generally, or specific known classes?

I don't know, I'm definitely no expert in this area, and haven't looked for any similar studies for other toxins, so I'm not sure if other similar research has been done.

That’s interesting. I’m having a hard time turning up the article. Any chance you’ve got at your fingertips?

I can't find a public link to the actual paper, but here's an article that covered the research and summarizes the findings: https://www.aabb.org/news-resources/news/article/2022/04/26/...

Thanks. For any others the ref is https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.6257

This probably won't answer your question, since the quantity you ingest is likely a key question, but I highly recommend reading it anyway:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...

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