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Comment by hcurtiss | Hacker News Reader

Purdy was improperly conflating their ability to detect the substance with "harm," and the environmental propagandists have been running with it for a long time. What "harm" precisely did he identify? The article doesn't say. Maybe a carcinogen? Maybe not? There's been a concerted effort to make PFOS/PFAS an environmental super-villain, but it's hard to substantiate when we volitionally ingest many flourinated pharmaceuticals daily (e.g., Cipro, Prozac, Flonaze, Pavloxid, etc.). It's been amusing watching the alarmist "science" press floundering with the "right" definition of PFAS that lets you hang 3M but still keep the life-changing drugs that require them. https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2022/is-there-a-right-d...

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Link from article on what purdy talks about bioaccumulation, but not at toxic levels, with some concerns that it could biomagnify in the food chain. The article blows this up and claims they knew all the harms then. Just bullshit. https://www.ag.state.mn.us/Office/Cases/3M/docs/PTX/PTX1533....

The fact that there is a specific atom in a product doesn't have anything to do with its dangers.

Chlorine gas or Phosgene are deadly, your stomach is full of HCl.

VX has phosphorus yet your body is full of it and that's part of the basis of how it handles energy and genes.

There are perfectly safe compounds that contain F.

The problem here is that we have report over report on the effects of those molecules, some coming from the companies making them. And yet somehow the people trying to raise awareness to those facts would be the propagandists? The propagandists are more the ones spreading misinformation, misleading others or hiding information.

PFAS are per/poly fluoro alkyl compounds meaning that they have many fluorine atoms on an alkyl chain. None of the compounds you listed have that which makes me wonder what you are trying to achieve commenting on something you know so little about.

ciprofloxacin has one fluorine, on an aromatic ring Prozac has three on a single carbon Flonaze has a single fluorine on a methyl Paxlovid has a CF3 like Prozac

Your definition of PFAS is not a universal definition, nor is it any indication of toxicity. To alleviate your own ignorance, you might read the article I linked, and the paper behind it (linked in the article).

The really wide definition seems to be mostly from economic organizations from what I could find. Which makes me question their interests here.

>The problem here is that we have report over report on the effects of those molecules, some coming from the companies making them.

And nearly all of those reports have little or no actual evidence of harm. Lots of people are making a lot of noise about the potential harms of PFASs, but most of it is just vague scaremongering with only the most scant basis in science.

The issue raised by the parent comment is highly pertinent. He isn't the one categorising organofluorine drugs as PFASs - it's the definitions proposed by researchers and regulators that are. Some reports about PFAS are based on a narrow definition, but many others lump together a vast and diverse range of substances that happen to have a C-F bond somewhere. It's very difficult to have an informed debate about something when there is in fact no agreed definition of what we're talking about.

Did you read this?

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

There's even a movie about it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAOuhyunhY

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