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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

There is not strong evidence that the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to cause any health issues at all. It is, of course, concerning. Nobody likes the idea of materials building up in their bodies.

But we can't say they knew they were hurting many people, because we still don't.

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Yet a drug—that people willingly and optionally take as opposed to this—must be proven NOT to create harm before it is allowed in the wild. Your argument sounds like it is in bad faith.

> must be proven NOT to create harm before it is allowed in the wild

This isn’t how we regulate chemicals in America. Perhaps it should be.

I think that that was the implication. We should elevate the standard for new chemicals that might enter our body through the environment to a similar standard we already have for drugs (chemicals we deliberately put into our body.)

To my knowledge, that’s not how we regulate industrial chemicals anywhere. I agree it probably should be. Those chemists are witch doctors.

I’m not sure how that is even possible, frankly.

What sort of test suite would THAT look like?

You are conflating very different things. Go into any Whole Foods and there is an entire aisle of pills that are not proven to not create harm, in fact, some of them most certainly do.

Pharmaceuticals play by a different set of rules than other chemicals because humans are particularly gullible when it comes to health claims. "Snake oil salesman" is a common term for a reason. We don't let big pharma make certain claims without ample test data for a whole host of obvious reasons.

In this context we were talking about punishing people for "harming" without having proven that they've really harmed at all. This would be more like locking up all the Chinese restaurant owners for using MSG.

Your argument sounds like it is in bad logic.

That really feels like a bad-faith and misinformed comparison.

Can you please at least do a very basic amount of research before you take sides on this? Perhaps watch a documentary (e.g. the devil we know) or read at least 1 wikipedia article -- it was clear from the outset that workers at these factories were giving birth to children with birth-defects for example. [1]

These companies had engineers who were actively concerned about its health effects, circulating internal memos to that effect [1], but just because there wasn't a finalized published study are able to claim "well.... it's not proooooven technically for 100% sure to be bad for you in small doses..."

Of course small doses of anything can take a decade to be proven harmful to newborn children. These are now being linked to ADHD, that's something that takes years of very intentional research to find (because how old does a kid have to be to get that diagnosis).

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/05/425451/makers-pfas-forever...

Documentaries are not research. I have read countless actual papers on this. You can find them online.

I am not taking the side you think I am, you simply are reading things into what I said that aren’t there.

I am sure 3M did awful things. I am sure high levels of the stuff are dangerous, certain occupations were exposed to it at dangerous levels, the company willingly ignored that. I’m sure they deserve this fine. Fines of this magnitude hit corporations where they live in the way that jailing a COO cannot.

I just think “mass harm” is not proven. Perhaps some simply define that differently than I do, I don’t consider the relatively tiny amounts of factory workers impacted to be mass harm. Awful, sure. But the hysteria about this, and what I think most people are talking about when they use that term, is the level all of us are exposed to via drinking water, food packaging, etc. There’s simply no proof (or even solid evidence) of mass harm by that definition, just hysteria. Proof may arrive one day, I do not know. As you point out, it may take years or even decades. (Though it has been around nearly a century, and in large quantities for some time.)

The word “linked” is always common in bunk science. When you see that frequently on any topic, you can be sure there’s hysteria.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect every chemical manufactured (they all can end up in water systems) to be clinically tested. Those chemicals are too important to modern life to yank them all. There are too many.

>> I just think “mass harm” is not proven.

Well clearly it's been proven to the satisfaction of the court, whatever your "personal research" says.

It's also been proven to an independent science council:

The C8 Science Panel, which was funded by DuPont as part of a lawsuit settlement, conducted extensive epidemiological analysis on human health outcomes from exposure to PFOA, a type of PFAS. This panel, composed of independent scientists, found links to several health harms, including two types of cancer and pregnancy-related issues, after studying blood samples from nearly 70,000 residents in the mid-Ohio River Valley. This area was significantly exposed due to its proximity to a DuPont Teflon factory (EWG).

More papers come out every year finding stronger links. I wonder what your horse in this race is, my friend?

[1] https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/science-pfas-rebuttal...

You simply do not understand my argument and perhaps it is my failing for that. In any case, I can’t make it any clearer than I already have so I’ll stop trying.

Every single western society takes a different approach to drugs that people directly ingest and industrial chemicals that might build up in peoples’ bodies. The calculus seems to be that people would rather have better non-stick pans and are okay with a few more people dying from them. You might disagree with that, but OP is just stating what’s apparently common sense. That’s the exact opposite of “bad faith.”

Well, people buy non stick pans despite there being evidence people may die from it, so I’d say the evidence is strongly in your favor.

My girlfriend is simultaneously outraged that there are PFAs in the water supply and has entire sets of pans that are disintegrating Teflon that she even puts in the dishwasher. When I point out the irony she shrugs.

A good description of the current state of society if I’ve ever heard one.

That is definitely not the bar for drugs, or most drugs would not be allowed to be sold.

The FDA requires that drugs provably and consistently have an effect, and that side effects are generally well known and not excessively bad so as to outweigh the benefits.

Drugs without known side effects are the worst in the eyes of the FDA (except those with no redeeming properties whatsoever anyway), because it doesn’t allow for manageable prescribing.

If they were proven to be safe, they wouldn’t require a prescription and would be sold over the counter. Though even that bar isn’t really required, or St. John’s Wort, Tylenol, etc. wouldn’t be allowed to be sold.

> But we can't say they knew they were hurting many people, because we still don't.

I’d highly recommend reading this article. It’s quite long but worth the read.

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...

Most of the comments here are highly disturbing, bring out the pitchforks. Its sad that this is on HN.

Most people don’t know the difference between a Netflix documentary and research.

That’s exactly why it’s bad, we don’t require businesses to prove X chemical/compound is safe before we start using it for whatever, no, we use it and just hope that it’s safe.

The problem is, there are very many chemicals, those chemicals in many ways power our modern world, and they can all end up in drinking water or ingested by some other means. If you took every chemical off of the market that didn’t go through a randomized controlled double blind study, billions of people would die. Literally. How many people are fed thanks to fertilizers and pesticides that we know would be actively harmful if you consume them in quantity? Or at least don’t know would be unharmful.

It’s not practical to ban everything that we don’t know can be ingested safely. It’s just not even an intelligent idea. It’s merely a response to hysteria.

These chemicals were suspected to be harmful but allowed to be used anyway. This is not an innocent mistake. Same playbook as the tobacco industry. Throw the book at them, they deserve it.

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p...

I am not suggesting that we ban all chemicals not properly studied, but we can do a lot to at least get a sense of what X chemical may be capable of doing to us if ingested.

I don’t think it would’ve been incredibly difficult or burdensome to think that a chemical that can with stand 900+ degrees celsius won’t be metabolized and broken down very well inside the body, the next obvious supposition would be well is the body going to be able to eliminate it in some way or will it just stay there? What happens if it stays there, that doesn’t sound very good? These are all basic questions 3M chemists could’ve asked themselves before they created this mess, or may be they did and no one paid attention.

Absolute nonsense. We've known since at least the 90s that this shit posed significant health risks. See Also: Parkersburg, West Virginia.

We can be reasonably certain that very high exposure is harmful, yes. Only a small percent of the population achieved that level of exposure, thankfully.

Things we know: high concentrations are catastrophically harmful, it persists in the environment indefinitely, and this shit is bio accumulative. That should be the end of any discussion about product safety.

Everything you just said is also true about water.

It's also true of lead. Care to eat a brick of it and report your findings?

All of your logic on this topic is leaving out the fact that our world is powered by a lot of chemicals, and without them, a lot of people would be dead. There’s a reason the population has grown so much in the last two centuries. We’ve gotten really good at making food, housing, and other things that keep people alive, and those all involve chemicals that have not gone through double blind randomized controlled trials and, in fact, have severe negative health outcomes if a human is exposed to too much of them.

It is not exaggeration to say that of the worlds 8 billion people, at least half of them would not be here without fertilizers and pesticides. Those are things that have, at times, caused environmental issues that harm people also.

If we were to take off of the market overnight every chemical that was not proven to have no possible negative effect, we would lose billions of people. Literally.

The reason we are phasing out PFAs rather than simply immediately prohibiting them is that they are useful in a lot of applications that are important and we need time to replace them, and barring certain egregious incidents like 3M dumping a bunch of it in the river, there just is no known harm. So we fine them quite a lot for the egregious incidents. Good.

This is the problem with the socialist mind virus, they act like everything has no upside so you can just prohibit whatever you don’t like and the world will be better off for it. That’s why you think counter-arguments are just pedantry. They aren’t, it’s just that you’re thinking about it is not in depth.

Let's be clear here. Exposure to specific PFAS are associated with a variety of health effects, including altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, and cancer. And while eliminating the firefighting uses of these compounds (as an example) would cause some issues, 3M, after significant evidence of broad toxicity was discovered, went on to expand the market for these compounds from domestic cookware to , among other things, children's clothing and food packaging materials.

Comprehensive toxicological studies haven't been performed on every single compound in the family because the market has been flooded with over 12,000 individual compounds. That is a startlingly large number that given 3M's prior bad faith decision-making around this family of products immediately brings to mind the designer drug industry's habit of burying regulators in compounds tweaked to get around regulatory bans.

In industries that actually perform comprehensive testing before releasing a compound into the wild it costs on average between eight and fifteen million dollars to perform a full suite of toxicological tests. So if the onus to test is placed on regulators that's roughly one hundred and twenty billion dollars out of public coffers and several decades of lab time, to confirm 3M, Dupont, Chemours, et al haven't poisoned the planet.

So if I understand your position correctly you're claiming that since we have absolutely no evidence that any of these compounds are safe at any exposure level (as you said, no toxicology has been done on most of these) and despite prior bad faith acts by the companies involved, we should continue to extend the benefit of the doubt? I think not, and your own choice to install water filtration equipment into your own home suggest you aren't as convinced as you'd have us believe here.

To be clear my proposal is that going forward manufacturers be required to perform the same pre-clinical trials that pharma companies have to perform before they can apply to move to human trials. Retroactive testing of existing compounds is absolutely a nice stretch goal because I think we can all agree if something harmful to our families is making it's way into the ecosystem we'd like to know about it sooner or later. I am utterly untroubled by the notion that these additional requirements might impact shareholder value and see no particular reason why taxpayers should be expected to foot the bill for 3Ms shareholders.

Right, your proposal is dumb. Most chemicals (including the ones we’re discussing) aren’t medicine. You wouldn’t give them to people to see how much it hurts them, that would be unethical. We do that with medicine because it might help them, so there’s a potential benefit both to the individual who is the test subject and to society. We’ve no reason to believe ingesting PFAs is of any benefit so what you’re proposing would be cruel. It would be akin to running tests on prisoners or dissenters like they do in totalitarian regimes.

And if you did give people the level of these chemicals that 99.99% of the population is exposed to, you’d see no real effects, because no real effects is what we see in people who aren’t exposed to really high levels of it. We see some very weak correlations that almost certainly have other underlying causes and literally nothing else. Which, again, is not to say the effects aren’t there. It’s just that they’re very small if they exist, and it’s really hard with no control group to be sure of anything with very weak correlations.

“Associated with” doesn’t mean anything at all. I can find a correlation between any two things if I look for it. That’s all this is. (And again, I’m not talking about the people who worked in factories with it or lived where large amounts were dumped into the environment, etc., that is what they got fined for and they deserve it.)

If what you’re proposing is we make every chemical go through clinical trials, that’s going to kill a lot of people both directly (lots of chemicals have little to no harmful effects if not ingested but are deadly if you do so) and indirectly (lots of people are only alive because of chemicals that would be yanked.)

This has nothing to do with shareholders, it’s a simple societal cost benefit analysis and you’re just dismissing any benefits and underestimating the cost.

You completely misunderstood my point based on your paraphrasing. Which is fine, that’s the internet for you.

> There is not strong evidence that the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to cause any health issues at all. It is, of course, concerning. Nobody likes the idea of materials building up in their bodies.

I mean the research is still relatively new and ongoing [1][4] where “most of the hundreds of PFAS currently in commerce have limited or no toxicity data” [5]. And in 2022 the EPA posted “…updated advisory levels, which are based on new science and consider lifetime exposure, indicate that some negative health effects may occur with concentrations of PFOA or PFOS in water that are near zero.” [2]. On top of that there are lots of PFAs which cannot be individually tested for — In 2019 the EPA “can now measure 29 chemicals”[6] out of “thousands of PFAS chemicals” [7] — which means many of those tests are only checking for a small subset of this class of chemical (though the older and more widely used ones have been prioritized for testing).

Also where do you get your control group from for low level exposure? It takes time to bioaccumulate and most people are already exposed to some degree —“Nearly all people in the United States have measurable amounts of PFAS in their blood” [4] — through many different sources — “There are thousands of PFAS chemicals, and they are found in many different consumer, commercial, and industrial products. This makes it challenging to study and assess the potential human health and environmental risks.” [7].

Some other interesting links/articles:

- https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/

- https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/i...

- https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-ant...

- https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...

- https://cen.acs.org/environment/persistent-pollutants/US-EPA...

- https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-anno...

Sources:

1: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html

2: https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pf...

4: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/resources/pfas-information-fo...

5: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t...

6: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-new-method-te...

7: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-explained

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