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Or asbestos, or leaded gasoline, or leaded paint, or Oxycodone (the “opioid crisis”) and so on. This list is too long to keep track of.
GAMI recently got a lead-free aviation gasoline broadly approved: https://generalaviationnews.com/2022/09/03/gami-unleaded-fue...
Leaded avgas is for older gasoline piston aircraft. There’s still many around but overall it’s not that significant and is slowly on its way out. The exhaust is mostly released high in altitude where there is ample time for extreme dilution.
The concern is mostly for people who work at small airports, live near them, or work with these aircraft as mechanics etc.
I think there’s an unleaded 100 octane formulation in testing that will probably replace leaded gas but the general aviation industry is small and slow moving.
Oxycodone didn't cause the opioid crisis just because it's an addictive substance.
I know people who only became curious about the dark web after I used it a couple times. It just spreads, I guess.
The reason they were curious is because after some really invasive dental surgery (with lasers!) they were given a laughably small number of pills, a supply that would only last about 3 days at the recommended schedule, for an operation that the doctors know and warned them would hurt for around a week after.
I still believe harm reduction is the answer, but we're still years (possibly decades) away from a legal implementation. And it's not a full solution because you'll still have junkies, but it might become easier to help them once they don't have to totally hide themselves.
Which PFAS? At what concentrations? What's the effect size? QALY loss per person affected?
> What are you gaining from being dissembling about this entire thing? What about it rubs you the wrong way so much that you’re rationalizing its ills by spreading falsehoods?
These insinuations are horrible and unnecessary. Stop attacking the motives of people who question something, that's very much against the hacker spirit.
Many people just like questioning everything, particularly things others seem to care deeply about.
These are great questions, and maybe they should have all gotten conclusive answers before they are introduced to the market.
Prove that your crap is safe, before you sell it.
[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d9/9e/63/d99e637a2aa93a9b4c88...
What you're suggesting is impossible.
From the first Google result I found (https://biorius.com/biorius-group/comparison-between-the-us-...)
> In Europe before selling anything, you must indeed make sure and confirm it will not harm anyone!
So I guess that’s why cosmetics and consumer goods don’t exist in the EU, eh?
I can’t help but think that’s an oversight from lack of imagination and lack of intuitive understanding of how much leaching and abrading goes on.
No they don't. Drug packaging is regulated too. It's tested for leeching, stability, etc.
I'm starting to get the feeling that many people are upset in this thread because they don't actually know what the current regulations are.
The practical implication is that your bloodstream is filled with relatively few small-molecule drugs and relatively many synthetic chemicals.
That makes no sense.
Of course a "packaging additive" only has to prove a lack of harm. What else would you prove?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-3m-pfas-toxic-foreve...
Your impression from the linked study should be that there is a large amount of uncertainty, not that there is a clear-cut link.
It is _not_ the tobacco story all over again, because the health effect of long-term tobacco use "as directed," and as occurs normally in real-life, results in an extremely massive increase in the risk of death from lung cancer, with a staggering 1 out of 4 long-term smokers (using more than 5 cigarettes a day) dying of lung cancer - something like a 5000% increase.
The health linkage between regular tobbaco use and negative health outcomes is overwhelming.
It is not the same thing here. These are small effects and difficult to notice, and there could be other confounding factors. (Maybe people in environments with lots of PFAS chemicals are exposed to other chemicals common in polluted water sources).
"A doubling of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) in maternal serum was associated with a 39% (p < 0.001) reduction in diphtheria antibody concentration in children (age 5 yr), with increased odds of falling below clinically protective values against diphtheria and tetanus at age 7 yr."
> A study of heavily exposed workers (n = 462, geometric mean serum PFOA of 4048 ng/mL) detected significantly increased incident mortality for cirrhosis (relative risk = 3.87, 95% CI 1.18–12.7) and liver cancer (relative risk = 6.69, 95% CI 1.71–26.2)
These are NOT small effects. These are strong p-values with large hazard ratios over and over again throughout the entire review.
I have no domain knowledge here but those CIs are quite large and both get close to 1 at the lower edge.
Yes, it shows that with 5% probability the risk is only 1.18 - why choose to focus on those 5%? According to the study there is an equal chance that the relative risk is 12.7 times normal, why should we ignore that?
Your reading of the CIs is off. It isn't telling you that there's a 5% chance that the real risk is 1.18. It's saying there's a 5% chance the real risk doesn't lie in the CI, and could be anywhere outside the CI, including 1 (no effect).
Here's the main point. Increase the significance level slightly, say to 97% (if this is a 95% CI, or 92% if this is a 90%, etc). Then a CI that large and that close to 1 at the left edge will turn into a CI that includes 1. The effect is not significant at all at that level. It wouldn't be saying the true effect is significant with some probability or whatever you seemed to be interpreting CIs to say. It would be saying there's no effect.
This is markedly different from the case of cigarettes, where the p-values are astronomically small. Since earlier comments seem to compare these chemical to cigarettes.
But again, I haven’t read the paper! Just chiming in with some half-forgotten epidemiology. :-)
Those are a very small part of the affected ones, probably firefighters or 3M production workers. Remember that the dosage makes the poison.
Or are you going to argue about how antibodies work?
Again, the headline figure you're quoting sounds alarming, but if it's accurate and applicable to the broader population, then we should be seeing that effect outside the lab as well.
Should we wait for that to happen if the risk is obvious?
There's loads of things I use in every day life that I wouldn't want to ingest in odd quantities. I handle gasoline and paint thinner and dishwashing detergents and hand soap every now and then but if you tried to get me to even drink a teaspoon of it I'd probably turn you down. Is the rule now if you wouldn't drink a glass of it you should never handle it in any way?
By the way, please do not drink that 26% salt brine. It will do very terrible things to your body and probably significantly hurt you.
> Is the rule now if you wouldn't drink a glass of it you should never handle it in any way?
Some things are not safe at any level. Lead (Pb) for example. So what about PFAS? Does it accumulate in the body? What are the effects of long-term ingestion?
My question was intended to see just how serious people were, who were making the argument that PFAS weren't a thing to be concerned about.
I'd avoid drinking a glass of motor oil as well, but I still prefer having my car lubricated at the end of the day.
feel free to develop a formula, if you so desire
Florine chemistry has been killing chemists and factory workers for hundreds of years, but reasonable precautions let people use many horrifically toxic substances without significant issue. Yet for cough some reason people keep a thing like new = safe when by default it’s been obvious that stuff containing Pb or F is probably risky in some situations.
In most?
How were they supposed to know? How about the deformities in animals around their factory runoff? How about studies prior to mass production?
Frankly we should be considering life imprisonment for the executives, regulatory attorneys, and chief engineers, and the corporate death penalty for the company.
However safety is not absolute and corporate harms are not always clear cut, as you point out. Perhaps the standard should be something like: does this do more harm than good, maybe weighting good by ~10x. Autonomous cars don't need to be perfect, just 10x+ better than human drivers.
Asset seisures should be in addition to jail for the most egregious cases, such as the Sackler family, who got off lightly for all the harm they caused.
Wasn’t that exactly big tobacco’s and then the global warmers’ playbook? And yet, it turns out that the effects are very real but much damage done and hundreds of billions earned while we were discussing the wrong thing.