Federal study links testicular cancer to ‘forever chemicals’
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This study does not merit wide attention.
Yes.
> Further study is warranted
Yes.
> What the study shows is that these chemicals have decidedly not shown to be safe and therefore ought not be used.
Absolutely not. And the fact that people think that kind of thing after reading sensationalized articles like this causes real problems.
This study detects an effect - and indeed, does so with statistical significance.
By definition, that seems like it can't be underpowered.
My stance has nothing to do with the study.
> In total, 16,150 individuals had ever been exposed. The hazard ratios did not indicate any excess risk of hyperthyroidism among those with contaminated water. For hypothyroidism, the risk of being prescribed medication was significantly increased among women with exposure during the mid part of the study period (but not men). However, the association with period of exposure was non-monotonic, so the significance is considered to be a chance finding. Our research was limited by the relatively simple exposure assessment.
The second one as well
> No association between serum PFAS and fecal zonulin was found. In conclusion, the present study found no consistent evidence to support PFAS exposure as a risk factor for IBD.
Because burning jet fuel in an enclosed interior ship space while hundreds of miles from land is a bigger and more immediate threat?
It makes sense to phase out dangerous chemicals wherever we can, but sometimes their use is a chemical imperative because there are no equivalent alternatives.
The X-37 reportedly uses hypergolic nitrogen-tetroxide + hydrazine fuel, which means everyone wears spacesuits around it on the ground. But it solves an engineering challenge that more mundane fuel mixes don't. Ergo, they use something toxic and dangerous.
If people of the past were as risk-averse as this we would still be living in caves.
> Absolutely not. And the fact that people think that kind of thing after reading sensationalized articles like this causes real problems.
Are you trying to say that this study did show these chemicals to be safe, or were they not shown to be safe? Believing the first would be a real problem.
There is no perfect scientific study, if you critique all of them to the point you critique this one, you will dismiss more-or-less all science.
Scientists who study the effects of various forever chemicals on health have read hundres of studies on the matter. And from those scientists I've talked to the overall consensus is definitely leaning towards these so-called forever chemicals having associations strong enough towards negative health outcomes that it's worthwhile to keep looking.
Yes, and that process is supposed to include judging the merit of the individual studies that make up the body of work. A hundred shoddy papers don't make a convincing body of work all of a sudden, they make a pile of inconclusive trash.
I'm not disagreeing with the consensus you point at, I wouldn't know, but you can't use "consensus arises from a body of work" to argue inclusion of anything in that body of work.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it has to convincingly (to some degree) reject the null hypothesis, as per GP's own words. And that doesn't dismiss more-or-less all science, it more or less sets the lower bar for what constitutes science in the first place.
>Associations with PFOS in the first/only samples were weak and not statistically significant.
The "first/only" samples were controls, they had generally very low levels of perfluorinated sulfonic acids and so no correlation was detected.
>Elevated concentrations of perfluorononanoic acid were inversely associated with TGCT
Only perfluorinated sulfonic acids were associated with testicular cancer. Perfluorononanoic acid is a carboxylic acid which is likely used as an alternative — i.e. those who were exposed to it were likely exposed to fewer perfluorinated sulfonic acids.
>whereas results were null for other PFAS.
This is the most dishonest part of your comment — you left out the preceding sentence about positive association of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid and perfluorohexanesulfonic acid with TCGT, and by omitting that context you made it look like there were no associations.
Isn’t this the default in America (and more countries, sure)?
I prefer the opposite (European) stance the companies have to prove beyond doubt the harmlessness.
(Or be strongarmed by the US or Fall to bribery like everywhere else… but at least there is trying)
There must be a reasonable balance struck somewhere. One cannot prove a negative, after all, and if anything new must be proven beyond doubt that it has no short, medium, or long-term effects on human health, you are not going to have anything new, period.
Acetaminophen, for example, has been in use for a century and a half, yet we still don't know how it really works[0]. If we don't know how it works, how are we to know that it won't harm us in some insidious way?
[0]: https://medicine.tufts.edu/news-events/news/how-does-acetami...
I think we can see a „dry-run“ of some product launch, point out dangerous flaws, and repeat until something actually useful is proposed that is not some profit-extraction tradeoff that makes something else worse.
This is rather extreme by intention, the truth probably is somewhere between, but I think most people can’t see how a more regulated system can actually thrive much better than putting people into poverty death loops and destroying the planet in the process.
Your prescribed solution is also flawed. It is impossible to prove a negative, so you are arguing we should stop inventing new things. These kinds of (Neo-)Luddist arguments always fail to take into account the huge upside of materials science over the past 100 years.
PFAS is kind of unique because it is politicised: there are lots of groups who claim harm and therefore don’t want to look at the science skeptically. And if harm actually exists, governments want to reduce liability so are happy to ignore any signs of harm before a cheap solution becomes available.
> these chemicals can of course be broken down
The parent comment didn't claim they couldn't be broken down, but that they "never [break] down". The (obvious) intended meaning is that the chemicals will not break down with regular use or normal exposure to common environments.
> It is impossible to prove a negative, so you are arguing we should stop inventing new things.
This is such a disingenuous line of reasoning that I almost wondered if you were intending to be comedic.
The parent comment was clearly advocating for policies that require companies to actually put forth effort to demonstrate safety over time. The longer a compound is expected to remain intact under regular conditions, the greater the guarantee of safety demanded. What you are advocating for is essentially what we already have: companies should not need to go to great efforts to demonstrate long-term safety because "innovation" and "progress", though of course when the companies say this they really mean "profit".
It is unclear what stake you have in advocating for such a position, but a good argument it is not.
On the other hand you're arguing for a very unfair world where people are unfairly exposed to hugely damaging chemicals and don't get any remediation for those damages because we don't ensure the profits from those chemicals actually offset their long term consequences and we don't require companies taking on such risks to adequately fund future lawsuits. I agree that's kind of been the norm in US-style capitalism, but I think there is a strong case it shouldn't be.
https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP10285
If this is true then with bio accumulation we have effectively a steady degradation where for each generation Male offspring present increasingly decaying sperm counts.
The climate crises is one which will take more than one generation to fix. But the fight is worthwhile and not impossible to win.
The topic gets danced around because the biggest change is women achieving independence and being able to completely control when and if they have a child, and incentivizing them to want to have children means quite a bit of wealth transfer, or rolling back their independence and access to birth control. Obviously, men would also need to be convinced to have children too, but that seems secondary.
The obvious long-term solution is that we do nothing and the fact that a desire for children is partially genetic solves the problem on its own.
(Edit: not really directed at parent poster. Just something you made me think of...)
How about:
- 12 month parental leave for fathers and mothers
- 20 days minimum payed holiday
- paid sick leave
- Free childcare
- Insurance covered 15 days assistance at home post partum with a post-natal caregiver
- Child stipends up to the age of 18 years old
None of this is ground breaking in many developed countries.
So much work yet to do in implementing pro-child policies and yet your first step is entrapping teenagers into a pregnancy and a lifelong commitment?
Guess I’m going to vote for going with the dystopian choices or the more palatable one of sticking our heads in the sand and not deal with the problem until it’s a catastrophe
[0] While childcare is technically free, my understanding is that, in practice, places are limited, especially in big cities.
[1] https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/512101/nombre-enfants-p...
The result is that most mothers pause their careers while the kids are small. The consequence is that most couples only have one or two kids.
The simple fact is, parenting these days is effin' hard. Even if you have place to put your kids in 5 days a week. I mean hellishly hard for few years, people go very close to mental breakdown regularly, or sometimes quite deep into it - seeing it a bit around us.
The bar to call yourself a good parent ain't about kids simply surviving. We know that ignoring child's cries whole night, every night messes them up badly for later life. Day naps effectively ruin your weekends. Diapers, fights for toys, lack of sleep which alone will fuck up most people badly but here we talk about all of this and much more, for years, while work doesn't wait. No help there.
The fact is, most folks simply have enough after 2 kids, we sure as hell do. There is very little additional 'parenting satisfaction' after 2 kids, yet costs and stress mounts. Also seeing quite a bit of fertility issues after first child around us, but that's not what people like to talk about.
My country is, apparently, one of the most deranged then. While all forms of contraception are currently legal across my country, it's harder to gain access to it in some places than it is in others:
https://www.glamour.com/story/birth-control-laws
However, some places in my backwater country have attempted (but not yet succeeded) to limit various forms of contraception, despite its legality[0] nationwide since 1965:
https://stateline.org/2022/05/19/some-states-already-are-tar...
And hundreds of elected representatives in the national government voted against[1] and finally blocked[2] nationwide legislation ensuring access to contraception. What's more, some members of our highest court have indicated that they'd like to revisit the issue[3] with an eye towards revoking such access.
I wish I didn't live in such a backwards country. :(
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/house-republicans-voted-again...
[2] https://www.help.senate.gov/chair/newsroom/press/republican-...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/24/contracep... (https://archive.is/dvON8 )
Sure this is still not at the level of banning all forms of contraception, but it's not a long shot and given the historically evident incremental nature of this combined with the focus on "abstinence only" sex ed (i.e. no sex outside marriage, i.e. no need for easy access to condoms or any other OTC contraceptives) I don't think this can be dismissed as a "slippery slope" fallacy either.
A fertilized egg has its own unique DNA, and begins development and dividing immediately. By the time it implants, it is made up of 200-300 cells.
Yes, this is, objectively speaking, an abortion.
“RU-486 works by blocking the action of the hormone progesterone, which is needed to support the development of a fertilized egg.” (From https://www.britannica.com/science/abortion-pregnancy )
The pill works at times by thinning the uterine lining, which is needed to support the development of a fertilized egg.
You can talk about what changes have or haven’t taken place in the body of the mother, but these are the same thing, just accomplished by two different means. We have other means as well.
You're argumentation would also imply that if a man has a nightly emission he is performing abortion because a child could have been created, then listing the biological comparisons between a nightly emission and abortion claiming similarities make them the identical.
That life is intentionally terminated by birth control and the morning-after pill in almost the same exact method as RU-486, which we know as the "abortion drug." Both cause the thinning of the lining of the uterus, preventing attachment or causing the loss of attachment to occur, respectively.
Most people who work in the field of abortion know this, and that is precisely why they bring up the loss of birth control as one of the (either intended or unintended) consequences of outlawing abortion.
In other words, both pro-choice and pro-life people know this is true, and acting like pro-life people are ignoramuses for believing this reveals a real lack of understanding of the science, not to mention the politics, and the moral questions involved.
I wish your comment included the importance of sperm and eggs individually to the process of creating life. Any argument you make about life creation should be made hollistically, and drawing the line at the pregnancy because that is near the time medication is administered is a mistake, particularly since that is likely temporary and we will see many other solutions in the future. I'm not sure what you are trying to say by comparing the morning after pill to RU-486 other than you view them the same. That's like saying calling out of work sick the night before and calling out 5 minutes before your shift are the same thing because you used a phone and the result was you didn't go to work, so I'm not sure if that's really what you're implying.
>>Most people who work in the field of abortion know this, and that is precisely why they bring up the loss of birth control as one of the (either intended or unintended) consequences of outlawing abortion. >In other words, both pro-choice and pro-life people know this is true, and acting like pro-life people are ignoramuses for believing this reveals a real lack of understanding of the science, not to mention the politics, and the moral questions involved.
I don't think most pro-choice or pro-life people know much at all about the subject and are opinionated anyway. As with most contentious political topics.
It would be a mistake to assume that all pro-life people are ignoramuses or lack understanding of science. This bias comes from the media showing pro-lifers purposefully rejecting science historically. The media has also shown many years of pro-choice pretention and that is why none of this reveals a lack of understanding of science as much as it reveals our laziness towards learning truths and our reliance on others to provide talking points that confirm our naive suspicions; especially if they allow you to uninvolve yourself directly with the problem, and that's on both sides without a doubt.
A blastocyst has 200-300 cells, yes. But if you hadn't stopped reading the Wikipedia article (or high school biology textbook) you'd have noticed that it also says that a blastocyst begins to form about five days after fertilization and implants two days later. Also even without chemical intervention only 30% of fertilized eggs survive to develop into blastocysts and successfully implant -- with implantation failure being the most likely outcome even if the fertilized egg develops to that stage. A lot of the lead-up treatments in IVF processes only exist to ensure that a blastocyst can develop and sucessfully implant itself.
Note that the literal "morning-after" pill (effective within 72 hours after intercourse) available over-the-counter in most countries including the US often only contains a progestin, i.e. it's just a higher dose equivalent of the regular pill. What you are talking about are pills containing an antiprogestin, which indeed can also act as an abortifacient, even though I've never heard any medical professional refer to a failure to implant as an "abortion".
That you're conflating all three of these pills (the Pill, the OTC morning-after pill and the one containing an abortifacient) is a good demonstration of the "incremental contraceptive ban" strategy I described.
While true, any western reduction in birth rates can be trivially explained by changes in child-raising. Children's critical hours of self-raising/peer-raising have been sharply degraded thru danger-culture & the erasure of free-roam areas. All of that is being forcefully replaced with adult micromanagement.
In short, we've swapped much of the joy with stress and stunting.
The weird stuff about sexual confusion is also unwarranted. You might think this is a measured take, but it's Q-ANON level nutso.
Yeah this person is not living in reality. I don't believe any modern argument framed around generations are poignant, accurate, or worth discussing seriously. People just use this pop-topic to signal, its so boring. These conversations are brimming with generalizations and bias.
I don't want to live in a world where everyone is forced to be excited that you wanted spread your seed 10 times. Bringing more mouths into the world is not automatically incredible, magical, or special.
A lot of people showcase cynicism towards family life because family is a very personal thing, no one should be expected to jump for joy except hopefully the family, friends, or small community.
These are the type of thought-provoking comments that I visit HN for. Just wanted to give you some positive feedback amidst all the knee-jerk negative reactions.
Ye, data seems to support that
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Between 1961 and 1974 in USA birth rate per woman dropped from 3.6 to 1.8.
The early 1960s witnessed the approval and widespread availability of effective oral contraceptives (birth control pills). This revolutionary advancement in contraception allowed women greater control over their reproductive choices and family planning. The 1960s marked a period of cultural and social change, characterized by the rise of the women's liberation movement and changing attitudes toward women's roles and family dynamics. Many women began to prioritize education, careers, and personal pursuits over traditional roles as homemakers and mothers. As educational opportunities expanded for women, more of them pursued higher education and entered the workforce. This often delayed the age at which women married and had children, which in turn contributed to smaller family sizes.
FWIW we have a healthy son now.
This has nothing to do with sperm counts. This has all to do with people not wanting to have the kids in the first place.
For a start, we'd need to find a way to run industry without expecting an ever increasing growth of profits (i.e. surplus value) and structure society in a way so we don't let individuals hoard resources at the expense of everyone else. If we didn't try to squeeze water from stones, maybe that would also allow industry to sacrifice some cost efficiency (i.e. ability to generate surplus value) in order to use safer materials and cleaner processes that don't poison us and improve our survivability and fertility? Heck, we might even create circumstances that make it easier for people to raise a family and have more support if they want to have children while at the prime age for both working and reproducing rather than having companies literally pay for their high value employees to freeze their eggs and sperm to delay having kids until they're less economically useful.
Oh sorry, I just did an anti-capitalism again. Nevermind all that, line must go up. Let's find ways to make more kids. Maybe Elon Musk has the answer after all and we just need to have billionaires sire more children with their female employees until the net population growth rate looks better.
Citation needed. Of all problems of this planet, underpopulation is not one of them.
"complex systems" -- whatever those are; global trade was a thing long before industrialization -- will survive slow declines. Japan is still a modern country even with a demographic decline.
lower sperm concentration (−8%, 95% CI: −16%, −1%)
total sperm count (−10%, 95% CI: −17%, −2%)
higher proportion of nonprogressive and immotile sperm (5%; 95% CI: 1%, 8%)
Basically all the 95% confidence intervals almost overlap with "no effect".
And for a study showing an effect of 1% change (maybe) That’s no different than zero.
No, it’s not anything close to “believe this is true”.
If they pursue profits in a reckless negligent manner that results in our death, that's not trying to get rid of us.
If it makes you sleep better ...
It does not matter if nature or some rich person tries very hard to get rid of us, if the net effect is the same.
Sperm count/testosterone level is strongly correlated with body weight; if you account for how much fatter people are nowadays the reduction is much less (e.g. compare a healthy weight person from 1970 to now). Similarly a lot of the reduction in fertility is explained by people nowadays being fatter.
virtually all conspiracy theories are still bunk as hell, and alex jones is a documented fraudster.
Except all the ones that have and will continue to turn out to be true.
Also maybe add phosphorus and radium to the list.
Maybe those billionaires obsessing about constructing their survival shelters weren't preparing for social collapse after all but just trying to create a habitat for themselves that isolates them from all of this?
They knew it was toxic for 73 BLEEDING YEARS[0], yet none of the studies come out publicly. They do it for profit, never any other reason[1]. Stock prices won't drop if people think it's safe[2]. They took a page right out of the big tobacco playbook there. It's as ingeniously profitable as it is evil.
[0] https://www.ewg.org/research/decades-polluters-knew-pfas-che... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/07/pfas-3m-... [2] https://static.ewg.org/reports/2019/pfa-timeline/3M-DuPont-T...
Lawsuit sources: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/dupont-p... https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/dupont-chemou... https://apnews.com/article/pfas-forever-chemicals-dupont-dri...
I see you do as much as you can do but I don’t think anyone is preserved because those chemicals are spreads. Wouldn’t be surprise if animals natality degrades too.
What kind of flows do you get from it? I get the impression they convert water very slowly so it's not like an instant open tap. For example could you connect to a dish washer or is it only a reservoir for drinking water.
What is the water waste like, as in how many liters are you spending in the membrane cleansing versus actual drinking water?
What kind of material is used for the tubing and containers it uses? I am a little be sceptical of using flexible tubing (usually flexible because of plasticizers) to then feed and accomulate water into a reservoir.
Also I’m sure it would only explain part of the observed increase, since there are social factors at play.
- Not every trans person experiences gender dysphoria
- Trans people have existed historically and widespread non-binary gender identities have been observed in indigenous societies prior to modern pollution
- There are men who take estrogen for health benefits and they generally don't report gender dysphoria or desire to transition
- Men with low testosterone levels generally don't report gender dysphoria or desire to transition
- There's no literature whatsoever suggesting any link between hormone levels or other endocrinologic factors and gender dysphoria or the desire to transition
- Being openly trans was practically illegal and subject to mockery, harrassment and violence until fairly recently, even more so than being an openly gay man was
- Due to the "underground" nature of trans identities, many elder trans people lacked the language or concepts to express their identity, instead landing on more socially acceptable identities (e.g. gay men or lesbians) or adopted labels like "transvestite" whereas young people are more likely to embrace identities under the queer, trans and non-binary umbrella
- While society and the law has become a lot more accepting of queer and trans identities, access to mental health and medical care like hormone treatments and surgery is often gatekept to "protect" people seeking it (with the implication being that they are likely wrong about thinking they need it) and a diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" is usually one of the most reliable ways to gain access to these even when it doesn't accurately describe the person's experience ("autogynophilia" is the mirror version of this where "gender euphoria" specifically for trans women when allowed to express themselves as women is medicalized and framed as a sexual fetish to delegtimize it)
For the record, I'm not trans but I know and have spoken to trans people in my personal life and have read a lot about it from "both sides".
(note that people demanding sources like this are often selective about what they demand them for...)
If you're more inclined to believe technobabble than sociological explanations when you don't understand the facts behind either, that's a bias you might want to investigate further.
EDIT: FWIW most of the medical claims I made are the null hypothesis: I can't demonstrate that there is no literature suggesting a link between "natural" hormone levels and gender dysphoria but the claim could be dismissed by showing literature that demonstrates it.
The closest you can find is the hogwash pseudoscience of "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's arguing for a social contagion and it's citing the subjective experiences of parents of trans people and thus defines "onset" as "when the parent found out" (and "rapid" because this is usually close to an open social or even medical transition). To make this even more meaningless, it gathered those reports from a forum specifically for parents who dislike that their kid identifies as trans, i.e. who likely gave the kid no reason to come out to them while they could avoid doing so and thus would likely have been the last person to find out rather than being trusted with this information early on. Again, I don't need to cite sources for this. You can literally look up the "study" and you don't need a degree in sociology to understand the obvious bias and shoddy controls that went into it.
If you don't believe that trans people existed before the 1980s, I suggest you look into the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, whose research on gender and sexuality fell victim to one of the first book burnings of the Nazis.
If you don't believe there are indigeneous communities with non-binary gender roles, you can literally google that.
If you don't believe people who would have chosen to identify as "trans" had they been born later used and continue to use other terms to describe themselves, there are literally people doing this and saying so, publicly and openly.
By insisting that I give you a thoroughly sourced thesis paper in response to an equally unsourced claim, you're shifting the burden of proof. And you're doing so without pointing out which specific claim you want sourced, what kind of source you'd find acceptable and why you can't do this yourself.
You'd think "correlation does not equal causation" was widely understood enough that I just need to say "piracy prevented global warming" and people would know what I mean but let me reiterate: you can't just say "X happened and Y also happened around the same time, so X likely caused Y" unless you can demonstrate not only that X and Y happened around the same time but also that X directly contributes to Y.
OP1 - Here is my unpopular opinion.
OP2 - May or may not be right.
OP3 - Here is a big list of reasons why you're wrong.
The first two didn't provide any sources either, admittedly, but they didn't really make any statements of fact.
I didn't ask to pick on you or because I have some political motive(honestly, I have no idea or opinion on whether OP1 was right), only because it was the first post presented as definitive in the chain.
Honestly I think we should take OP1’s thesis seriously, but not as proven. And as usual cut down on pollutants for the wildlife it does affect.
Uh, isn't this sort of definitional? My impression is that every trans person is experiencing gender dysphoria; that's like, what trans is.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/26895269.2022.21...
It talks a lot about "gender incongruence".
There is also "gender euphoria" which may be experienced by people who do not/did not experience dysphoria.
I'm not sure whether from a clinical standpoint distress about incongruance is the same as dysphoria.
There are a lot of people who would have failed to meet previous diagnostic criteria but nonetheless are happy to have received gender affirming medical care. I think the best we can do is provide people with bodily autonomy on an informed consent basis.
Side note. Why does Android keep auto-correcting dysphoria as dysphagia. Wtf is dysphagia anyways?
You called being trans a "social contagion" in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37291089
And for anyone reading this, I really have no issue with trans people. Pretty much everyone starts with a clean slate with me in my book.
For example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lj4V-Nme86U
This is most of the reason why it's become so controversial in recent years, because law and policy are being implemented based on this, rather than the previous, medicalized understanding.
The movie industry started to boom in the early 1900s, which is precisely when left-handedness rates skyrocketed: https://i0.wp.com/slowrevealgraphs.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
It's more like left-handedness (or good old homosexuality), in that the rate of incidence is not increasing but rather that social repression has backed off slightly and people feel a bit more confident being out.
People can be a bit more open about their gender when they're less afraid of being killed for it.
I would also 'guess' that those who transition and dress moving from female to male, can 'pass' more easily in society. Even if someone still has female features, if they dress like a guy, no one cares.
He didn't say that they weren't :-/
What evidence are you basing this statement on?
He’s talking about the increase. He never claimed trans is new.
I hear this exact same argument for autism, adhd, gender disphoria, cancer, heart disease...
I also hear about how hard it is to come out, and how you should believe what someone tells you because no one would sign up for this lifestyle without good merit. And I also hear about the increase of hate crimes, and the fact that it is the topic de jour of modern American politics.
Seems like we are consistently eating our cake and having it too, here.
Personally I think that the way the media talks about the male half of the population is responsible. Nobody ever says anything good about men, the male brand has become as toxic as Enron, and some people don’t want to be associated with it anymore.
You actually do see it happening everywhere.
But social environment is obviously a major factor too. Some of the recent uptrend is likely learned.
My girlfriend, who has a background in environmental science and skincare, also got interested in this and ended up starting a personal care brand focused on being 100% free of Endocrine Disruptors / forever chemicals: https://olivercare.co/.
I truly believe as more studies continue to come out strengthening the connection between these chemicals and the long term health and fertility risks, consumers and brands are going to shift to safer alternatives. In fact, there's a chance that "forever chemical" lawsuits end up being bigger than the famous Big Tobacco settlement: https://time.com/6292482/legal-liability-pfas-chemicals-laws... .
And I don't do anything to unduly avoid modernity and her sins, so here's an anecdote to run counter to yours.
It feels like the time has come.