SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the ignorance-is-bliss-but-it-causes-cancer dept.
New federal rules require public systems to measure and mitigate certain harmful man-made chemicals:
Cordelia Saunders remembers 2021, the year she and her husband, Nathan, found out that they'd likely been drinking tainted water for more than 30 years. A neighbor's 20 peach trees had finally matured that summer, and perfect-looking peaches hung from their branches. Cordelia watched the fruit drop to the ground and rot: Her neighbor didn't dare eat it.
The Saunderses' home, in Fairfield, Maine, is in a quiet, secluded spot, 50 minutes from the drama of the rocky coast and an hour and 15 minutes from the best skiing around. It's also sitting atop a plume of poison.
For decades, sewage sludge was spread on the corn fields surrounding their house, and on hundreds of other fields across the state. That sludge is suspected to have been tainted with PFAS, a group of man-made compounds that cause a litany of ailments, including kidney and prostate cancers, fertility loss, and developmental disorders. The Saunderses' property is on one of the most contaminated roads in a state just waking up to the extent of an invisible crisis.
Onur Apul, an environmental engineer at the University of Maine and the head of its initiative to study PFAS solutions, told me that in his opinion, the United States has seen "nothing as overwhelming, and nothing as universal" as the PFAS crisis. Even the DDT crisis of the 1960s doesn't compare, he said: DDT was used only as an insecticide and could be banned by banning that single use. PFAS are used in hundreds of products across industries and consumer sectors. Their nearly 15,000 variations can help make pans nonstick, hiking clothes and plumber's tape waterproof, and dental floss slippery. They're in performance fabrics on couches, waterproof mascara, tennis rackets, ski wax. Destroying them demands massive inputs of energy: Their fluorine-carbon bond is the single most stable bond in organic chemistry.
"It's a reality for everyone; it's just a matter of whether they know about it," Apul said. As soon as any place in the U.S. does look squarely at PFAS, it will find the chemicals lurking in the blood of its constituents—in one report, 97 percent of Americans registered some level—and perhaps also in their water supply or farm soils. And more will have to look: Yesterday the Biden administration issued the first national PFAS drinking-water standards and gave public drinking-water systems three years to start monitoring them. The EPA expects thousands of those systems to have PFAS levels above the new standards, and to take actions to address the contamination. Maine is one step ahead in facing PFAS head-on—but also one step ahead in understanding just how hard that is.
Cordelia and Nathan both remember the dump trucks rumbling up the road. They'd stop right across the street every year and disgorge a black slurry—fertilizer, the Saunderses assumed at the time, that posed no particular bother. Now they know that the state approved spreading 32,900 cubic yards of sewage sludge—or more than 2,000 dump-truck loads—within a quarter mile of their house, and that the sludge came in large part from a local paper company. Now they wonder about that slurry.
Maine has a long, proud history as a papermaking state and a long, tortured history with the industry's toxic legacy, most notably from dioxin. In the 1960s, another group of compounds—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS—began to be used in the papermaking process. The chemicals were miracle workers: A small amount of PFAS could make paper plates and food containers both grease-proof and water-resistant.
Then, in the '80s, the state encouraged spreading sewage sludge on fields as fertilizer, a seemingly smart use of an otherwise cumbersome by-product of living, hard to manage in a landfill. In principle, human manure can sub in for animal manure without much compromise. But in reality, sludge often contains a cocktail of chemical residues. "We concentrate them in sludge and then spread them over where we grow food. The initial idea is not great," Apul told me. The Saunderses first found out that the sludge-spreading had contaminated their water after the state found high PFAS levels in milk from a dairy farm two miles away. Maine's limit for six kinds of PFAS was 20 parts per trillion; state toxicologists found so much in the Saunderses' well water that when Nathan worked out the average of all the tests taken in 2021, it came to 14,800 parts per trillion, he told me.
Nathan used to work as an engineer for Maine's drinking-water-safety program, and he quickly pieced together the story of their street's contamination and just how bad it was. After state researchers tested their blood, Nathan remembers, a doctor told him that his levels of one PFAS were so high, they had hit the maximum the test could reliably report—2,000 micrograms per liter. So far, he's healthy, but he feels like he's living on borrowed time. Diseases related to environmental exposures can take decades to emerge, and although studies show that PFAS may degrade health at a population level, why some individuals fall ill and others don't isn't always clear. Cordelia told me that the neighbor who wouldn't eat the peaches is now on three medications for high cholesterol (which has been linked to PFAS), and that other neighbors have bladder or brain cancer.
[...] Several labs across the country are trying to find a way to unmake these chemicals, using foam fractionation, soil washing, mineralization, electron-beam radiation. David Hanigan, an environmental engineer at the University of Nevada at Reno, is studying whether burning PFAS at ultrahigh temperatures can break the carbon-fluorine bond completely. He once thought that PFAS researchers were out of their minds to be testing such wildly expensive solutions, he told me. But he's realized that PFAS are just that tough, and as a scientist, he thinks the original manufacturers of PFAS must have understood that. "It's upsetting from an organic-chemistry standpoint," he told me. Any chemist would have known that these compounds would persist in the environment, he said. Indeed, an investigation by The Intercept found that DuPont, among the original manufacturers of the compounds, did know, and for decades tried to obscure the harms the chemicals posed, something the UN Human Rights Council also contends. DuPont has consistently denied wrongdoing, and recently settled a lawsuit for $1.18 billion, helping create a fund for public water districts to address PFAS contamination. (In a statement to The Atlantic, a spokesperson for DuPont described the current company's history of corporate reorganization, and wrote that "to implicate DuPont de Nemours in these past issues ignores this corporate evolution.")
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14, @12:23PM (7 children)
For better, guaranteed results of a horrific death, one may try a polonium tea. Or dimethylmercury.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 14, @02:24PM (6 children)
The point of drinking antifreeze is that, unlike Po which has a half life, antifreeze sticks around in your body until death... Drink enough over your lifetime and it will shorten it, dramatically after a certain amount.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 14, @03:25PM (5 children)
Posting a link here to my other post on this subject: it doesn't [soylentnews.org] unless, of course, you die of antifreeze poisoning.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 14, @04:21PM (3 children)
I do stand corrected (by present preponderance of evidence) on Ethelyne Glycol - with amusing antidote of Vodka injection. Not so many years ago, common wisdom around the various auto shops I had intimate dealings with was that Ethelyne Glycol poisoning damage was cumulative across a lifetime - and there may still be a kernel of wisdom in this regarding kidney function and similar problems - or maybe it was just to discourage new shop kids from tasting a liquid to see if it had antifreeze flavor (sweet) in it. But, whomever made the last edit on the Wikipedia page implies "full recovery" - so there you have it: Wikipedia, usually not too far wrong.
Regarding PFAS, current publications by the usual sources tell the "forever chemicals" story loud and clear in the headlines, such as: https://www.nrdc.org/stories/forever-chemicals-called-pfas-show-your-food-clothes-and-home [nrdc.org] https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-explained [epa.gov] The ever politically 'balanced' EPA says: "Scientific studies have shown that exposure to some PFAS in the environment may be linked to harmful health effects in humans and animals." https://chemtrust.org/pfas/ [chemtrust.org] A little less pandering to the SuperPACS:
And the link I refer to, here again: https://www.petinsurance.com/healthzone/pet-health/pet-toxins/teflon-poisoning-in-birds/ [petinsurance.com] is unequivocal in stating the high toxicity of Teflon fumes to birds.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @12:07AM (2 children)
Or pandering to different Super PACs. As I've noted elsewhere, a key driver here is probably the professional lawsuit industry looking for a new meal. They tend to donate democrat.
Fine I grant that your dad's canary might have been killed by fumes from overheated teflon in a poorly ventilated space. But how is that relevant to normal exposure to these classes of chemicals? To get Teflon to break down, you have to heat it to over 500 F, for example. If PFAS in your bloodstream are being heated that much, you have bigger problems than the fumes. It's not a serious category of concern for environmental exposure.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 15, @01:12AM (1 child)
>a key driver here is probably the professional lawsuit industry looking for a new meal. They tend to donate democrat.
Anytime the courts are involved it's already a hot compost pile mixed with carnivore feces.
>fumes from overheated teflon in a poorly ventilated space. But how is that relevant to normal exposure to these classes of chemicals?
How many people do you know who cook at home? Of those people, how many use a good (not recirculating back into the room) vent fan while cooking? How many never ever overheat a pan? How many used Teflon for decades because it is easier clean when they are done? I suppose if all the people you care about have staff to do their cooking in a well ventilated McMansion, then there's nothing to worry about.
When everything in the domestic environment contains PFAS, what happens in a house fire?
When your hick neighbors burn their trash, how much PFAS goes on the pile?
The "needs more study" scientists can't figure out why non-heated PFAS affect some people and not others - is it genetic, is it reaction to other chemicals in their environment / bloodstream? Probably both.
You want to find out next year that your pancreatic cancer is due to a combination of the PFAS in your home, your mother's ancestry, and an active ingredient in your diet? Fund more science and maybe they'll be able to tell you. As things are "we're so sorry, these things just happen sometimes."
Oh, this week it's PFAS... 20 years ago it was BPAs, which are still being "phased out." We were in Houston, home of plenty of environmental BPA exposure, but that's O.K. with them 'cause they like their little girls havin' big titties:
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @02:36AM
I know quite a few who don't have this problem. As to people who keep overheating Teflon pans without ventilation? No one ever said stupidity was harmless.
Don't breath the smoke then. That's already figured out.
Illegal and hardcore enforced where I am. Maybe you ought to do that, if it's such a problem where you are. Personally, I doubt it's such a problem where you are. Your hick neighbors aren't burning that much trash unless they're running an incineration business or the like.
Or the huge third option: other factors missed by the study.
This reminds me of climate research. There have been several times when a claim was made, found to be backed by terribly flawed research, then the identical claim made again with different research (the hockey stick of 1999 on up and more recently, the claim [soylentnews.org] that climate sensitivity is around 4-6 C per doubling of CO2 equivalent).
Or just had nothing to do with PFAS at all? What then?
And when the money and/or public interest runs out on PFAS, it'll be something else tomorrow.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 14, @04:37PM
>unless, of course, you die of antifreeze poisoning.
This just in from the stupid piece of human excrement department: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/georgia-father-sentenced-50-years-prison-poisoning-newborns-breastmilk-rcna147708 [nbcnews.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]