Scientists are only beginning to understand how PFAS impacting our health
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- PFAS increases liver and kidney weight of rats (in unspecified conditions)
- PFAS can kill monkeys (in some unspecified large dose)
- A baby was born with birth defects near a DuPont plant manufacturing PFAS (no further information, just this n=1 coincidence)
- PFAS was associated with a decrease in post-vaccination immune response to certain vaccines (in one small observational study? how did they come up with this, I thought it was disrupting the liver? smells of HARK-ing and p-hacking.)
All the rest of the article's words are devoted to theoretical speculation and background, much of it entirely unrelated (e.g. the Faroe Islands mercury studies, which seem to have provided much stronger evidence of harm than they have for PFAS). The article suggests that, if you believed all the research about the harms of PFAS, you would think they were a sort of all-powerful super-contaminant. This sounds suspicious to me rather than credible.
Clearly we need more research, and I'm philosophically opposed to contaminating the environment with weird forever chemicals as much as anyone else. But I'm struggling to understand what we know now that scares us so much. Could PFAS concerns be partly some kind of enviro-moral panic?
Analysis: Most research on PFAS harms is unpublicized
... significant links between PFAS exposure and risks of preterm birth, ovarian and breast cancers, osteoporosis, and gestational diabetes ...
https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/02/pfas-can-suppress-white-blood-...
PFAS Can Suppress White Blood Cells’ Ability to Destroy Invaders
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS)
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-secret-industry-documents-reve...
Secret industry documents reveal that makers of PFAS 'forever chemicals' covered up their health dangers
https://apnews.com/article/science-climate-and-environment-g...
EPA: ‘Forever chemicals’ pose risk even at very low levels
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/12/pfas-for...
Societal cost of ‘forever chemicals’ about $17.5tn across global economy – report
Edit: The second link is actually a paper.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-023-00997-6
[2] https://doi.org/10.1080/1547691X.2023.2176953
[3] https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
[4] https://doi.org/10.5334/aogh.4013
[5] https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pf...
[6] https://chemsec.org/reports/the-top-12-pfas-producers-in-the...
Teflon themselves have an article acknowledging it[1].
Now I know that our respiratory systems are much more resilient than those of birds, but out of precaution I'd still rather not be the one to test the long-term effects of cooking with those on humans.
[0] https://www.allaboutparrots.com/cookware-parrot-safe/
[1] https://www.teflon.com/en/consumers/teflon-coatings-cookware...
At this point that experiment already happened on previous generations, yah?
I want further research and restrictions on these things, because even the marginal effects on populations of billions means millions of people harmed, but we're so many decades in that "only beginning to understand" seems a bit overstated - if the effect size was hugely toxic wouldn't we have seen it by now (like cigarettes). Life expectancy plateauing or starting to tail off is not great, but there are a lot more obvious causes for a lot of that, and it's not critical yet.
I would rather be more proactive about new stuff in general than focused retrospectively on PFAS.
[0] https://www.webmd.com/pets/dogs/ss/slideshow-foods-your-dog-...
The point is to have an early warning in a situation where gas concentration potentially increases from harmless to dangerous levels, as in a mine shaft, where ventilation is limited. Something that is harmful in low doses to a bird isn't necessarily so to us, until it is too late, which makes the bird useful as an early warning signaller so people can get out early when the dose is still harmless and thus not easily detectable.
Thus the saying "the dose makes the poison".
Caffeine overdoses are too common among people and I've known friends that have died or almost died from them. (I'm strongly on the never side for caffeine pill usage as the risk of an OD from coffee is much lower and involves a lot more liquid sitting on your bladder.)
Theobromine in chocolate (and tea and other places) is a Caffeine relative that in us humans has a 1/10th to 1/100th the efficacy on our caffeine receptors. In dogs that relationship is reversed and theobromine is their caffeine and death by chocolate is their caffeine overdose.
People can overdose on theobromine too, it just takes much higher quantities still than caffeine.
Which yes, aligns with your point that doses matter, but the other thing useful thing to note about the Theobromine/Caffeine relationship is that subtly different but related chemicals have wildly different effects on different metabolisms. It's not just dose that matters, but also exploring the repercussions of entire families of chemicals (and the products they break down into) because you also need to know if a "cousin" chemical has larger efficacy at lower doses in people. (Results on small animals are still an early warning sign, the directions they may warn about aren't just exposure time or dosage amount, but also related chemicals and receptor paths and many other things.)
In any case, would it not be safer to assume the possibility of harmful impact of Chemical X until more concrete data is gathered? Granted, the fear mongering in the media needs to pump the brakes, but err on the side of caution, and all that.
Then again, where does the burden of proof lie; on PFAS not being harmful? That doesn't sound right either.
Bit of a headache, I guess.
You could argue that with food, there is a necessary trade-off, but with PFAS there isn't, because we don't need it to survive. But that is true for most of modern civilisation, and what you then end up with is the "this substance is known to the state of California to cause cancer" on basically everything.
You are right that this becomes a difficult problem of epistemology. Basically, it is impossible to prove "this is safe", only the opposite, and often it is not easy to prove conclusively. I'm not sure where the right balance lies, either.
This is true, but by itself this model presents an incomplete picture for assessing the risk of PFAS. Two additional models are important: bioaccumulation and half-life.
PFAS stick around (pardon the pun) in the environment. They are biomagnified upwards through the food chain. If we are releasing them into the environment at a greater rate than they are degrading, then the biosphere is building up a reservoir of PFAS whose acute effects in humans will lag their release into the environment.
Additionally, it is hard to assess the lethal dose of something over a lifespan vs. an acute exposure. This is because slow poisons tend to pick up correlations and interactions with other illnesses as they progress over time (e.g. someone who struggles to get out of bed because of a persistent infection will also get less exercise and sunlight). So the long-term effects of things on the body tend to be less tractable research questions and thus have a negative bias in the scientific literature, which can easily be mistaken for "evidence of absence". This is why the precautionary principle is important for anything that is as pervasive as PFAS.
Agree with long-term effects - this is really hard. The precautionary principle is dangerous in that you could justify the most draconian COVID measures like lockdowns with them, which in hindsight were unwarranted and unprecedented over-reach, having no positive effect at all.
I don’t think there is a recipe that can be easily followed, you have to have very good people, both intellectually and ethically, and even then its still hard.
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/pollutants-and-contaminants/poly...
"Total concentrations were 1.9-5.3 times higher during cooking than in the background air but, for some compounds, differences of tens or hundreds of times were registered. PM10 from grilled pork was found to contribute to non-negligible cancer risks and to be very toxic, while samples from other dishes were categorised as toxic."
Be careful there. It's difficult to know historical base cancer rates, given recent advances in cancer detection. It's likely lots of cancer deaths in the elderly were simply chalked up to old age.
Also, every time DNA is copied, you roll the dice with cancer. Live long enough and you'll eventually get cancer. As people live longer, one expects cancer rates to increase, all else being equal. (Yes, there have been recent dips in life expectancy in the US, but over the time frame I'm presuming you're comparing with "our current high rates of cancer", the trend is still positive.)
Now, maybe cancer rates have increased due to increases in environmental carcinogens. However, it's not obvious to me that's the case.
It isn't about feeling, it is about rolling the dice with the future of everyone's health, and inadequate steps being taken to stop this process.
For some reason humans have a weird, irrational quirk where they miscalculate uncertain risks by assuming that the outcomes will fall on one side of the distribution until it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that they won't. It's a reflection of the same miscalculation that makes running a casino extremely profitable.
I think we should be transparent as to the reasons why we're going after this risk. If we don't know very much but feel the potential implications are sufficiently grave, let's be honest about that. Rather than latching onto alarming but potentially low-quality studies as providing us the truth, which leads to whiplash, loss of scientific credibility, and polarization, as we've seen during the COVID pandemic.
And this quirk may be the end of us - e.g. don't react to AIs getting smarter and smarter until it's too late to do anything.
I, for one, don't want to pay these costs.
You’ve given the impression that principles are not appropriate to act on.
Notice the difference in removing the word “philosophically” from your response.
I merely think we should separate our principled opposition to contamination from our assessment of what we actually know scientifically about the effects of said contamination.
I'm talking about the difference between epistemology and prudence. We can be honest that we don't really understand the risks of these chemicals, and at the same time take prudential action to mitigate the risks we don't know about.
In the legal cases, it came to light that chemical companies had themselves documented a wide and significant amount of damages to humans and animals, including a large amount of assembly line workers involved in the production of Teflon, who died or suffered significant illnesses.
I’ve read about concerns of PTFE poisoning from flakes, too, which are super common because some people fucking love to use metal utensils on their non-stick cookware.
Long story short, you’re definitely getting toxic chemicals sent to your home. The level of exposure seems variable based on your use.
"I am Shiva the god of death."
This phrase sets of the same alarm bells for me as “think of the children”.
It was the main argument made by proponents of tobacco, climate change, asbestos, artificial sweeteners, trans fats, HFCS, DDT, etc, etc.
There has been strong evidence that PFAS causes severe health issues since at least the mid 1990’s.
People can always use weasel words like “some studies show there may be a correlation” (and leave out the p=99.99999 from the cited studies).
Here’s a present-day example for DDT, over 50 years after it was banned: https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/ddt-...
The bar should be for proving safety, not proving harm
Its disturbing to say the least.
-
Here is my own personal theory based on observations through travelling a lot in South East Asia ;
There are a lot of pesticides and fertilizers that are over-used in rural famring areas of the china, philippines, malasia, thailand, laos, myanmar etc...
These chemicals "turn the frogs gay" - while seen as a 'conspiracy' trope - the fact is that the endocrine systems of mammals amphibians and (perhaps) reptiles are impacted heavily due to these chemicals.
The reason why we see a f-ton of "lady-boys" in places like thailand, philippines and other rural asian communities where rice is the staple of not only the diet - but a large part of the economy (the philippines has a national rice management department as they state that its the right of every family to have rice on the table (source, my ex-brother-in-law worked for this department)... we see that in the rice paddies they advertise which pesticides/fertilizers they are using, and they are coaxed into over-use of the chemicals...
These leech into the aqua-sphere and it affects the endocrine systems of the pregnant, young and developing people...
It results in a switch from high testosterone to higher estrogenic development, which results in more femininely expression in males...
Assuming everything you said is true your last sentence about how hormone production somehow switches. That needs to be backed up by some source. It's a big leap in conclusion if those fertilizers you talk about does not mimic estrogen
Would you say you’re now an authority on the matter? Do you plan to continue your research?
We are stressing over so much crap that may have some impact on our lives, but there are huge 'low hanging fruit' that make it inconsequential. like inactivity and too much sugar.
Fear about health (read: self-preservation) is a basic instinct. That aside, it's not fear of the known, it's fear of the unknown. Again, pretty natural. Unknown and fear go hand in hand.
The sad fact is, we willingly introduced "variables" into the environment without having a clue about the impact any of them might have. Worse, is what happens when they mix in the wild.
Given the track record of Big Chem, there's no reasonable reason to remain calm. Big Chem is a known, and fear is not inappropriate when profits come before all else.
I say interesting, based solely on your bullets and not having read the article, because monkeys are similar enough primates to humans that when something affects them like that, we likely should be worried. We can't make ethical studies that result in death in humans (let alone debate the ethics on killing monkeys), so what's the scoop?
https://www.chemicalsafetyfacts.org/health-and-safety/does-c...
Then there is the liver whose job is to filter out said toxins. It might not be able to do it's job if the concentration is 1000x but at 1x it should be fine(assuming the liver can recognize and clear the toxin in the first place)
You are right that we cannot reliably detect an increase in 1% risk but if the initial overall risk was just 0.5% does that increase even meaningfully contribute to anything?
Here is a link supporting that idea: https://www.brainandspinalcord.org/motor-vehicle-accident/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
From the Wikipedia link:
1097: During the First Crusade, according to at least one chronicle, many crusaders died after drinking too much from a river while marching to Antioch.[16]
1991, Andy Warhol: Five years after his death, Warhol's family publicly accused the hospital where he had his gallbladder removed of causing his death by water intoxication administered post-operatively. A claimed autopsy weight of 68 kg (150 lb), with his weight being 58 kg (128 lb) when admitted, was cited as evidence that too much fluid had been given.[17]
November 16, 1995: Leah Betts, a British schoolgirl, died as the result of drinking too much water, though in the media her death was mistakenly attributed to taking an ecstasy tablet at her 18th birthday party.[18]
2003: British actor Anthony Andrews survived a case of water intoxication. He was performing as Henry Higgins in a revival of the musical My Fair Lady at the time, and consumed up to eight litres of water a day. He was unconscious and in intensive care for three days.[19][20]
February 2, 2005: Matthew Carrington, a student at Chico State University in Chico, California, died as a direct result of a fraternity hazing ritual involving forced water intoxication.
January 12, 2007: Jennifer Strange died after drinking nearly 2 gallons (7.6 liters) of water in an attempt to win a Nintendo Wii.[21] The KDND radio station's morning show, the Morning Rave, held an on-air contest entitled "Hold Your Wee for a Wii," in which contestants were asked to drink as much water as they could without urinating. The DJs were made aware of the dangers but did not inform the contestants. KDND's parent company, Entercom Sacramento LLC, was subsequently ordered to pay $16,577,118 in damages to Strange's family.[22][23]
March 11, 2020: Zachary Sabin, an 11-year-old child, died after being forced to drink almost three liters of water in just four hours by his parents. They thought his urine was too dark, so they made him drink water until he threw up.[24]
July 4, 2023: A 35 year old Indiana woman died after consuming too much water while on vacation with her family. [25]
I will tell you what scares me:
- I think covid has maybe a 10-20% chance of leaving a large portion of the population partially disabled (with small but significant effects like lead)
- We have new diseases coming out all the time. This is pretty new, and specific to humans living with the density and travel we have today. Most serious human diseases are <10,000 years old. I think this is >20% risk.
- I think PFAS are also in a 10-20% chance range.
- I think there are a half-dozen similar things currently in the environment.
- Toss in some reasonable probability for biological superweapons (which can now be made at many university labs by a clever undergrade).
- Add in thermonuclear war, which was very possible during the cold war, and seems increasingly possible now.
- Global warming. I think it's overblown, and I'd also toss it in the same 10-20% range of being a civilization-ending crisis.
- AI apocalypse
... and so on.
Modern humans have been around for (big-O) 100,000 years. Prior to 200 years, we had zero ways to cripple or end or all human life (or all life) on the planet. Today, we have literally dozens. I don't think any individual one is that likely, but I am increasingly concerned that we might have reached:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
I'd like for us to invest the resources to take each of these seriously and address them. That's really where I'd like a big chunk of my tax dollars spent. Right now, we're spending big-O zero resources on serious crisis mitigation.
FEMA is maybe 0.01% of our GDP.
That's not really a fair way of looking at it, since military, CDC, etc. aren't part of FEMA, and play similar roles, but the point is that I'd like us to have a holistic infrastructure for:
- understanding risks
- mitigating them
- having big projects to eliminate them (like we had with getting rid of many diseases like smallbox a half-century ago)
- leading and coordinating globally
- having food stores, medical supplies, shelters, and access local manufacturing capacity
- having emergency capacity (e.g. producing all the artillery shells Ukraine needs, or all the respirators we thought we needed during the acute phase of covid).
... and so on.
If that takes up 10-30% of our GDP, I think that's money well-spent. I actually don't think that would take that big of an increase in spending, since a lot of our existing capacity could be generalized. For example, the military could train for a lot of domestic disaster relief and coordination as well. We could give small subsidies to e.g. manufacturing plants if they maintain more general capacity and excess capacity. Etc.
I struggle to understand why people believe this. Every person I’ve met has had covid at this point, and I’ve never met anyone with any kind of disability from it.
When you look at the randomized control studies, long covid (excluding those intubated) basically doesn’t exist.
I know a half-dozen people who have long covid at a level it impacts daily life. I believe all were immunized before. For myself, I definitely have reduced lung capacity (e.g. how far I can swim underwater is significantly reduced). I'm not an athlete and it doesn't matter, but if every time I catch covid reduces this by a similar amount, it definitely will add up to where it does matter.
> When you look at the randomized control studies, long covid (excluding those intubated) basically doesn’t exist.
References? We must be reading different studies. As a footnote, there's no such thing as a "randomized control study" here (unless we were willing to intentionally randomly infect people with covid), which suggests you might not be qualified to read studies....
Most studies I see show long covid in the low double-digit percent range.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9978692/ has a nice reference trail.
Click around and you'll see most studies do, in fact, show pretty high levels of prevalence
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2023&q=long+covid-...
“ 1645 articles were screened but no randomised controlled trials were found. 16 observational studies from five countries (USA, UK, France, Italy, and the Netherlands) were identified that reported on 614 392 patients”
and say “ which suggests you might not be qualified to read studies....”
Without expecting derision and mockery to follow.
You claimed "When you look at the randomized control studies, long covid (excluding those intubated) basically doesn’t exist." I pointed out RCTs don't exist. You post a quote backing up my claim, with "derision and mockery."
I am done here. I expect more derision and mockery, but I would strongly suggest a middle school level remedial class in basic source-based writing.
It's less some new finding about the specific compounds and more a shift in default position.
I get the impression this hasn't been studied enough and likely won't be anytime soon
They started being introduced to the environment in large quantities just as obesity rates started to rise in the late 70s and 80s, the health effects are poorly understood but seem to have an impact on weight and the endocrine system, and they can be carried downstream (obesity rates are globally higher at lower altitudes).
The other best candidate is lithium grease, which has the same distributional attributes but has also been proven to increase weight and explains some of the occupational discrepancies in obesity.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
Two books have helped me understand the obesity epidemic:
Burn by Pontzer - https://www.amazon.com/Burn/dp/0241388422
Podcast about above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CSNS45RJL0
Hungry Brain by Guyenet - https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Brain-Outsmarting-Instincts-Ov...
Podcast about above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlWriMdYuKk
We don't need some magic explanation for people being sedentary and fat.
Look at any old cookbook and you'll see that the calorie content in a typical "healthy" meal has gone down not up, people used to load up every dish with tons of fat, sugar and syrup, and still struggled to gain weight.
Mechanics, cops, security guards, firefighters, janitors, handymen, and personal service workers are twice as likely to be obese as high school teachers, professors, natural and social scientists, cooks, programmers, and lawyers. How can that possibly be if the principal factor is activity level?
Why is obesity higher at lower altitudes if it's just about the availability of cars?
Treating obesity as a cultural problem of personal moral failing is ignoring the cold hard facts: the epidemiological contour of the obesity epidemic points to a chemical contaminant that some people are exposed to more than others, not a cultural shift.
> Why is obesity higher at lower altitudes if it's just about the availability of cars?
In my experience people who live at altitude (e.g. Denver) tend to be more active as a rule, so lets say cultural forces. Could be because they burn more energy surviving too.
> the epidemiological contour of the obesity epidemic points to a chemical contaminant that some people are exposed to more than others, not a cultural shift.
Yeah, it's sugar. To be clear, I'm not ruling out the possibility that phthalates or something else do have an affect, but we can solve most of the problem right now by removing sugar and corn subsidies and redirecting the money toward community gardening and youth sports programs.
I think your statements are in conflict. There have been enormous shifts in food production and consumption over the last few generations.
If modern cookbooks had more fattening recipes, then I would be wrong and obesity would be explainable by culture, but they don't. Modern cookbooks are leaner than old cookbooks. In decades and centuries prior to the 1980s people ate more sweets and fats, not less.
Modern cookbooks have leaner recipes because obesity is a problem now. Obesity is not a problem now because cookbooks have leaner recipes (how would that even work?)
Having lots of high-calorie foods available has never caused people to get fat until recently, when it suddenly started happening all over the world all at once, especially to people who work with heavy machinery. You can't just blame McDonalds for that.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/10/its-not...
That old comfortingly-simple explanation is feeling more and more outdated each year.
It's not like sweets and calorie-dense foods were rare before the reagan administration. Just look at an old cookbook, tons of sugar and fat everywhere. Despite the availability of calorie-dense foods many people struggled to raise their weight above 23 BMI because their bodies naturally made them eat fewer calories, to the point that most weight-management pharmaseuticals were geared towards helping people gain weight. You can't explain that with fast food and food culture alone.
On the toxicity, standard table salt is extremely toxic you if you eat enough in one go. So the challenge is not “is it toxic” but rather at what quantities and over what exposure. Thus these studies along the lines of “we fed some lab animals a ton of this stuff and they died” aren’t super useful in figuring out if we have a big problem or not.
I’m all for taking a cautious approach here given the unknown unknowns, but like a lot of emerging science the truth is it’s messy and takes time to figure things out. This public and press are not well equipped to navigate and communicate on that reality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File...
Are there consequences? Absolutely!
Were the benefits or costs greater? Now that's a more interesting question.
But we can feed people, so it's probably worth it.
1. "79% of studies reviewed reported that smaller farms have higher yields, with yields increasing 5% per 1ha decrease in farm size."
2. "77% of studies finding that smaller farms have greater biodiversity at both farm and landscape scales"
3. "no statistical evidence for farm-size relationships with resource-use efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions, or profitability"
Here's another paper that specifically breaks down people fed per hectare: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034...
Hint: it does. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/why-use-lead-in-paint/30...
Or CFCs over replacement fluoropolymers?
Replacements which, circling back to the OP, may be decomposing into persistent organic chemicals. https://cen.acs.org/environment/persistent-pollutants/CFC-re...
Sometimes you get something for free, but more often you're trading something in exchange for it (at minimum, cost).
Maybe it's a valid trade-off, maybe not.
But ignoring the consequences on both options is an incomplete comparison.
Sure, industrialization has had some benefits, but it is also full of bad actors who internalize profits and externalize their effects. Example: These chemicals we KNOW are bad and unsustainable, but whose use we do not change because it is cheaper so someone at the top can keep making money.
Posting here for posterity:
1. Secura: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HLPVR45/ref=redir_mobile_desktop/133-1464296-5591920?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=dp_ob_neva_mobile
2. Ottoni Fabbrica: https://ottonifabbrica.com/en/home/15-alice-nero-8711369209998.html
3. Frigidaire Kettle FD2129We treat silicone as a plastic like any other, given that it has many plastic-like properties: flexibility, malleability, clarity, temperature resistance, water resistance."
It's a little misleading to just call silicone plastic with no disclaimers. That site is also called "life without plastic", so I'm not sure it's the most neutral source.
I get the sense that people on the internet believe silicone to be more safe (e.g. for sous vide cooking or baby products) for whatever reason. Maybe because it is more chemically stable or decomposes to sand or whatever. But really you can't draw many conclusions about any synthetic material unless there has been thorough research. A given polymer species can have very different properties depending on the additives used, and those can be the most dangerous to health. And the same material between different manufacturers could have different chemistry and health risks. It's a big complicated world...
>Metal additives from the manufacturing process are causing cancer
Just a guess, plastics are pretty stable, its the additives that are the cancer causing parts.
Can we stop the whataboutism or are we all smokers here too?
But if you do it anyway and don't record the results, then it isn't a study, so you don't even need to ask the ethics panel!
Then, if later it does cause harm, you can shield yourself behind the fact you were just following government guidelines and the government approved it.
How we are not more screwed up metabolically is actually somewhat surprising to me. We didn't evolve to metabolize and tolerate these chemicals.
So they just disrupt homeostasis of the organism and even the environment.
This is the ultra smart animal version of exponential growth killing off its own species
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the companies were seeing alarming signals in their animal studies — in one study, monkeys exposed to extreme levels of PFAS died — and among their employees. In 1979, DuPont observed that workers who had contact with the chemicals appeared to have higher rates of abnormal liver function."
So, in other words we've known since BEFORE we landed on the moon and, still, nobody cares.
Scientists will study this while nothing changes and then perhaps some treatments will be released at exorbitant cost (of course, sighting the research and development costs of the treatment as the reason without any acknowledgement of costs to the people for unwittingly being exposed to this garbage in the first place).
Are we even making forward progress as a civilization anymore?
See:
> The evolving landscape of chemical production has rendered toxicological testing using traditional models (i.e., live animals) impractical, and advances in science coupled with ethical concerns have resulted in government agencies, including the United States (US EPA 2021b), European Union, and Canada (Bhuller et al. 2021), committing to reduce, refine, and potentially eliminate the use of mammalian models from certain regulatory testing requirements, where scientifically justified. New approach methodologies (NAMs) are broadly described by the international risk assessment community as any technology, method, approach, or a combination of these that can be used to reduce, refine, or replace animal testing and allow more rapid and effective screening of chemicals. These methods may include the use of computer models or assays with biological molecules, cells, tissues, or organs as well as exposure measurement approaches. [1]
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...
P.S. CTRL+F "Health effects" in that report to get a cursory idea of the risks.
Source: worked as a data analyst at the Existing Substances Risk Assessment Bureau
I live in NYC and had the state do lead testing and cyclopure do PFAS testing. Was very happy to have both come back clean / zero detection.