New PFAS discovered with novel testing method
research.unc.edu
research.unc.edu
Given how much PFAS has been found in remote corners of the world, I think it is safe to assume that most of the world has been touched by PFAS. Everywhere humans try to find PFAS, we find it. The reason we hear about it so often now is that we are checking for it everywhere. And like the article describes, there are new PFAS being discovered all the time.
This is a generational issue.
The fact that we can't just ask them "what were you chemically making 20 years ago" is really an absurd blackhole in regulatory frameworks.
Basically, even the leading edge regulatory frameworks tackling PFAS are doing so _after it's polluted things_ and has _no idea_ what they're associated with, other than large scale manufacturing, 3M, etc.
On the one hand, it's easy to understand since manufaturing has so many different components, but a sheer "there's clearly chemists somewhere, making this shit up and detailing what they're doing" issue, it's pathetic.
They were aware, and the incentive to fix was there. There have been consistent and sustained attempt to cover up these issues for decades, because of sheer greed.
Don't assume that bottled water is any safer (or more dangerous) than your tap. After all, when you look at the fine print of cheaper bottled waters, you'll often see something like "Sourced from the XXX municipal water supply."
I also remember staying at the Poland Springs resort and observing that they had septic tanks a 10 minute walk away from the "shrine" to the original "Poland Spring," and finding trash in the woods that had been there for years.
Let me give you the data to back it up:
https://www.wpr.org/dnr-says-bottled-water-companies-arent-r....
One 2021 study found PFAS in 39 out of 101 bottled water products that ranged in levels from almost zero to nearly 19 parts per trillion. David Strifling is director of the Water Law and Policy Initiative at Marquette University Law School. He said there’s no general assurance that bottled water is safer than tap water.
The meme that corporations exist exclusively for the benefit of shareholders is a very recent, very extreme phenomenon, yielding exactly the sort of results you would expect. Externalizing costs, especially in ways that are dispersed enough not to be addressable by any particular affected party, is the whole point of the modern enterprise. It wasn’t always this way and it need not be this way in the future.
In sheer probability, your 'dont do X' is really a minority outlier and doesn't help anyone.
I used to work in municipal water software and I don't think this statement can be said broadly. It helps to segregate discussion of water into segments:
- Water extraction and storage health
- Water mainline delivery health
- Water lateral/service line health
Extraction and storage are usually pretty good across the board. Mainline can vary and lateral/service line varies highly in quality.
Mainline health usually comes down to maintaining pressure and flow, especially at the end of a service area. In some cities you'll see them dump water from the hydrant, other cities don't have such good hygiene (and stagnant water is dangerous). Service lines have historically been considered on the owner to deal with; there's now federal funding to fight things line lead service lines (of which there are still huge amounts). Service lines do impact overall water health though, as not every water meter or mainline connection has backflow prevention.
Furthermore he may be a minority (or not, all we know is you both have a different social circle) but that just make him someone with originals idea so let’s listen instead of blaming (please).
However my understanding is that proclaiming someone opinion is a “minority outlier” without any more info or source is rude and close minded. Also, how do you understand “minority” in his comment?
It’s like saying “I have a different opinion of yours and I think your opinion is not popular here so shut up please.” By the reactions, his post brought interest and more ideas from others so it’s a good think he didn’t auto-censored.
Details: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea...
Separately from this, there's some science to suggest that PFAS are harmful to humans, but at doses very much higher than experienced by the general population. Many of the headlines about PFAS being detected in weird places involve parts per trillion, and at that level, no health impacts have been demonstrated. Even for lead and ethylmercury in water, the norms are in parts per billion.
Then, there's a cottage industry of anti-progress doomsayers who want to equate it to a handful of big environmental missteps of the past, so the lines get blurred. Same as with microplastics, where you're bombarded with headlines about them being found in random places and being vaguely bad for you.
Right, but since it bio-accumulates even if your exposure is low over the decades you may accumulate enough of it for it to affect your health. If your body can't get rid of it then it's not the dosage that counts anymore, it's the total exposure over your lifetime that matters.
As it stands in our system today any awareness we may have about dangers will come far after the danger to us, and then we'll all say a collective 'oops' as we've had to do the last hundred times. Look no further than all the 'I [live near the plant/play on the field/drink the water] and have [cancer/autoimmune/rare disease/etc]' stories that keep coming out year after year.
Also we didn't really stop putting them in the water yet...
If it’s widely used and profitable to many, you can be sure you won’t hear from it.
Yes, did you know, fetuses start as single cells?
Because you definitely need it if you thought your comment did anything.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/stricter-federal-...
The Wolverine shoe leather tannery up the road dumped their ScotchGuard contaminated scraps/waste in the swamps behind a farm owned by a family friend back in the 70s and 80s. Now my well water is contaminated with a few parts per trillion of PFAS, and the PFAS levels in my blood are significantly higher than the threshold of proven harm.
https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/safety-injury-prev/environmen...
Compounds in plastics mimic hormones putting everyone (and the whole biosphere) on low grade hormone replacement. There's not a question about "if", but "how much". They are biologically active, they are present inside you.
From a 2016 study in Vermont:
> More than 400 wells tested positive for PFOA. More than 300 wells had concentrations at levels greater than the state’s PFOA/PFOS drinking water standard of 20 parts per trillion (ppt). The maximum level of PFOA detected in a private drinking water well was 4,600 ppt.
https://dec.vermont.gov/sites/dec/files/documents/PFAS%20Sam...
Thanks for posting the (ppt) 20 ppt. It looks like all the animals have higher levels.
One example, with a Science(TM) paywall, cited on the wiki - Great tit near 3M, Port of Antwerp, Belgium 2007 liver 553–11,359[39]
Had a 553-11,359ppb from liver tests published in 2006.
Really happy we moved away from ppb to ppt.
I don’t think there’s any issue at all with getting ahead of forever chemicals and regulating them before it gets to climate change levels of disaster (in some deregulation parts of the country, it will soon be legal to contaminate the soil and groundwater with pfas and radioactive materials because some politicians friend wants to sell their companies waste to road work).
I am sorry, but I simply disagree that the issue is minimal here. We should be treating this as if it’s already out of control and stamping it out before propaganda pieces settle and let it become out of control.
However, if we are able to better detect them, we can build better remediation which we need.
But again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The fact is, our ability to detect harmful health effects, particularly over the long term, is still in its absolute infancy. There is absolutely no reason to declare things safe until proven unsafe, particularly, particularly when you look with a historical lens.
The damage of a chemical will always be greater than what we can measure, because science (measuring blood levels of tens of thousands of people with mass spectometry and correlating against long-term health events like cancer) is incredibly hard, expensive, and slow.
As a thought experiment, suppose a chemical released in the water increased emotional irritability by 1%, or ADD by 2%, or reduced sperm count by 3%? What are the odds that we'd be able to conduct a study sensitive enough to prove the link? And what are the odds that anybody would happen to guess that correlation existed and choose to look in the first place?
I wish i could upvote this more
>> and at that level, no health impacts have been demonstrated
There’s a really important distinction between these two mindsets. The presumption that small amounts of chemicals should have to be demonstrated harmful to be considered toxic, is a mindset that is common in the self-identified scientifically skeptical, yet is anything but. It’s somewhere between careless - something like “humans have always consumed whatever is in the environment, therefore that’s the baseline” - and simply parroting corporate propaganda and lobbyist talking points.
Like asbestos, we should shelve this substance, even if it's good at what it does.
I don't think many chemists want to admit that there's very little reason to believe any PFAS formulation could ever really be safe. Perhaps one could be designed to break down faster and be less bioaccumulating in animals but realistically their mechanism of action as surfactants - the reason they're so industrially useful - is the very reason they're toxic to living organisms.
Surfactants fundamentally change the surface tension of water and other fluids which has an effect on everything from how biological surfaces adhere to each other (including to the internal extracellular matrix that most multicellular life depends on to organize its cells) to how proteins fold together. Normally surfactants like soap, lecithin in egg yolks, and glycolipids are not a problem because they're immediately biodegradable but not PFAS.
The carbon-flourine bonds that make them so resistant to breakdown and so bioaccumulating are the reason why they work in such a wide range of industrial environments, surviving high temperature and strong redox reagents that would normally rip apart any other molecule. It's the worst kind of catch 22. The whole class should be banned and the industry forced to live with the consequences like all the anti-fouling agents that are banned in the maritime industry.
This would increase the cost, but there's no good substitute for PFAS polymers, so people who really needed them would be willing to pay.
Chemours, a renamed DuPont factory, has been caught dumping PFAS into the river before. Funnily enough, it was spun off partially in order to assume liabilities against DuPont from the various lawsuits they had against them for very similar reasons.
There are also multiple superfund sites along the river. Pollution has been an issue for decades and yet nothing ever really seems to change.
That's not an accident.
> To avoid responsibility for what many experts believe is a public health crisis, leading chemical companies like Chemours, DuPont and 3M have deployed a potent mix of tactics.
> They have used public charm offensives to persuade regulators and lawmakers to back off. They have engineered complex corporate transactions to shield themselves from legal liability. And they have rolled out a conveyor belt of scantly tested substitute chemicals that sometimes turn out to be just as dangerous as their predecessors.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/business/chemours-dupont-...
Why do we need 14,000+ different PFAS substances? I honestly did not know there was this many out there.
The chemists are from UNC and the article writer from NC State University. Is it common to just use just "Carolina" when referring to locals instead of "North Carolina" (to differentiate from the South)?
To this day, however, UNC-CH is still often referred to as Carolina, UNC, Chapel Hill, or - for athletics - the Tar Heels.
It's less commonly recognized outside the state... I live in NYC now and often have to catch myself when I say something like "I'm headed back to visit a friend at Carolina" since it almost always results in "oh? which one?"
[1] https://shop.goheels.com/mens-fanatics-branded-black-north-c...
Go Cocks!
Seems like a smart way to lay a claim to a bigger market rather than being tied to a specific city or state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Global_...
Most industrialized nations have average PFOA blood serum levels ranging from 2 to 8 parts per billion;[57] the highest consumer sub-population identified was in Korea—with about 60 parts per billion.[52] In Peru,[58] Vietnam,[59] and Afghanistan[60] blood serum levels have been recorded to be below one part per billion. In 2003–2004 99.7% of Americans had detectable PFOA in their serum with an average of about 4 parts per billion
I know correlation is not causation, but look up the corresponding other statistics about those countries' population health such as life expectancy, and that data seems to suggest the exact opposite to "PFAS are harmful".
As of November 2023, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified PFOA as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1) based on “sufficient” evidence for cancer in animals and “strong” mechanistic evidence in exposed humans.[119]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_1_Carcinogens#Chemi...
Alcoholic beverages
Processed meat (consumption of)
Tobacco smoking
...including things that people will voluntarily ingest without much worry.