Exposure to Perfluoroalkyl Substances and Women's Fertility Outcome:
Hundreds of everyday products are made with highly toxic fluorinated chemicals called PFAS. They build up in our bodies and never break down in the environment. Very small doses of PFAS have been linked to cancer, reproductive and immune system harm, and other diseases.
For decades, chemical companies covered up evidence of PFAS' health hazards. Today nearly all Americans, including newborn babies, have PFAS in their blood, and more than 200 million people may be drinking PFAS-tainted water. What began as a "miracle of modern chemistry" is now a national crisis.
In 1946, DuPont introduced nonstick cookware coated with Teflon. Today the family of fluorinated chemicals that sprang from Teflon includes thousands of nonstick, stain-repellent and waterproof compounds called PFAS, short for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances.
PFAS are used in a staggering array of consumer products and commercial applications. Decades of heavy use have resulted in contamination of water, soil and the blood of people and animals in the farthest corners of the world. PFAS are incredibly persistent, never breaking down in the environment and remaining in our bodies for years.
DuPont invented the PFAS chemical patented as Teflon, but 3M became its main manufacturer. In 2001, a scandal erupted in Parkersburg, W.Va., after discovery of the Teflon chemical in the drinking water of tens of thousands of people near a DuPont plant. (The story is documented in the film "The Devil We Know.")
A class-action lawsuit uncovered evidence DuPont knew PFAS was hazardous and had contaminated tap water but didn't tell its workers, local communities or environmental officials. The lawsuit also triggered studies linking the Teflon chemical to cancer and other diseases.
The most notorious PFAS chemicals – PFOA, the Teflon chemical, and PFOS, an ingredient in 3M's Scotchgard – were phased out in the U.S. under pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency after revelations of their hidden hazards. (They are still permitted in items imported to this country.) Numerous studies link these and closely related PFAS chemicals to:
- Testicular, kidney, liver and pancreatic cancer.
- Reproductive problems
- Weakened childhood immunity
- Low birth weight
- Endocrine disruption
- Increased cholesterol
- Weight gain in children and dieting adults
PFOA, PFOS and the related phased-out compounds are called "long chain" chemicals because they contain eight carbon atoms. Since these chemicals have been phased out, the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration have recklessly allowed the introduction of scores of "short chain" replacements, with six carbon atoms.
Chemical companies claim this structure makes them safer. But DuPont admits that the short-chain chemical GenX causes cancerous tumors in lab animals. A 2019 Auburn University study found that short-chains may pose even worse risks than long-chains, which supports scientists' growing agreement that the entire class of PFAS are hazardous.
[...] The number of U.S. communities confirmed to be contaminated with the highly toxic fluorinated compounds known as PFAS continues to grow at an alarming rate. As of June 2022, 2,858 locations in 50 states and two territories are known to be contaminated.
Journal Reference:
Nathan Cohen et al., Exposure to perfluoroalkyl substances and women's fertility outcomes in a Singaporean population-based preconception cohort, Sci. Total Environ., 2023. DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162267
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Thursday March 23, @06:02PM (5 children)
Sure am glad we had all that new Non-Stick Cookware growing up. I don't have any non-stick cookware now. Also, just because it said "non-stick" didn't mean it didn't have issues with some things sticking anyway.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Funny) by krishnoid on Thursday March 23, @07:29PM
Considering the PFAS don't break down in the environment, I'm guessing they're the ones doing the sticking (around).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 23, @07:54PM (3 children)
This is a (darkly) fun watch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film) [wikipedia.org]
One the one hand, a properly seasoned cast iron pan can be reasonably non-stick.
On the other hand, the latest consumer craze is "Non-Teflon" ceramic coated non-stick cookware.
I just know that I bought a nice square skillet that had about 1/4" of Teflon on it (most Teflon coatings are much thinner) around about 1990, and that sucker stayed slippery for 20+ years. Of course, 11 and 13 years into that period we had two sons born with profound Autism, but that proves nothing.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday March 24, @01:07AM (2 children)
... made with ceramic nanoparticles, which end up in your food and are able to cross the blood/brain barrier (BBB). Wait 20 years and there'll be revelations that the manufacturers knew this was high-risk for inducing Parkinson's or something similar but suppressed the research.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24, @01:21AM
It's more likely that most manufacturers would quietly tell their researchers to not research into safety on anything that they're not required to by the regulators etc.
So like those BPA free plastics - they might use alternatives and not bother testing too much on safety: https://www.science.org/content/article/bpa-substitutes-may-be-just-bad-popular-consumer-plastic [science.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 24, @09:52AM
Like AC said, when I worked for a company with a dirty little open secret about their product, we were (never in writing) intimidated away from investigating anything about it.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23, @06:30PM (9 children)
And yet I still get called "anti science" for shying away from GMO'd foods or even wanting them to be labeled so I can choose. They even use fallacious arguments like, "we've been genetically modifying food for centuries", when they know full well that "GMO" is an agreed upon term for methods that supersede traditional selective breeding.
Worst thing is, for a lot of these things our individual choices don't matter. I don't have non-stick pans or khakis that bead water, but I'll end up drinking PFAS anyway, and if GMOs sneak in to my food and turn out to have unanticipated side-effects I'll suffer along with all the other people who thought it was harmless.
I'm not even sure where to draw the line sometimes. I don't want to move back to a cave. I'm on the damned computer, and manufacturing those is polluting water in China even as we speak, rivers dumping heavy metals in to rivers, fish floating belly-up past cities choked with smog; but because of high tech society, we can also research and cure diseases that were hopeless a century ago, and do and see things we never imagined.
It's a trade-off I suppose. Pass me dat GMO'd PB and J in the asbestos bag.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by krishnoid on Thursday March 23, @07:28PM (2 children)
Which methods? Some particulars would be helpful.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 23, @08:06PM (1 child)
CRISPR is the big one. Anything that goes around willy nilly putting bio-luminescence into things is in the same boat.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23, @09:17PM
I think direct gene manipulation pre-dates CRISPR. CRISPR is just more precise. I'd say anything that inserts a gene that wouldn't naturally get there in a reasonable time is GMO. e.g., Cattle DNA getting in to a tomato. A tighter definition would be the direct insertion of genes as opposed to cross breeding, which would also classify something as GMO even if the genes were from the same species. You couldn't detect that kind of GMO with a test, and it's arguably more benign whereas finding mammal fur genes in a plant is definitely GMO as is the aforementioned bio-luminescence in most cases.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 23, @08:15PM
>rivers dumping heavy metals in to rivers, fish floating belly-up past cities choked with smog; but because of high tech society, we can also research and cure diseases that were hopeless a century ago, and do and see things we never imagined.
I had an interesting demo of this once... East Germany 1990, I biked from Hamburg to Berlin - got a scrape, nothing came of it, and that was good because healthcare was rather thinly spread and none too advanced there. Two weeks later, I got a scrape outside Dusseldorf. Rode into town, and four hours later I had blood poisoning - red stripe running up from my wrist growing longer fast enough to watch it change. Of course: Central Dusseldorf, hospital 5 minutes away, advanced medical care, antibiotics, tetanus shots, wound cleaned and dressed and immobilized in a cast within an hour after noticing the problem. If that infection had happened in the East, I might have lost my arm - or died, but... with the lower population density the disease density was also lower.
In addition to promoting New York and Los Angeles as idyllic American cultures to be emulated, we should also be exporting glamorous movies about life in the undeveloped wilderness of Arkansas, the economically tranquil Cuban countryside, etc. There are other things to aspire to besides fancy cars, flashy cell phones and McMansions with "cee-ment ponds."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday March 23, @10:59PM (4 children)
Because objecting to GMO foods and wanting them labeled as such is ignorant of the facts: Even without rDNA techniques, "traditional" selective breeding post-WW2 involves hybridizing using plant tissue cultures and various mutagens to introduce normally impossible genes in existing species before selectively breeding out the defects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeding#After_World_War_II [wikipedia.org]
What's even more of a joke is that the underlying mistrust issue isn't resolved with labeling: There's nothing stopping the industry from using rDNA techniques to introduce the genes they want and then lie about the process to say they mutated them in with radiation and selective breeding so it will count as non-GMO.
Basically, you're going the Amish thing here: You're running a random line in the sand saying "tech up-to this year is fine, beyond that it's heresy" and expect everyone else to play along with this nonsense. So, they'll give you your silly labels and charged you extra for "organic" or whatever makes you happy.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24, @01:16AM (1 child)
You misunderstand the Amish. They're not anti-tech. They're mostly against *outsider* tech that they can't control. Each ordnung makes choices about what they'll accept, and the criteria aren't simply "new tech bad". One guideline that I've heard commonly used is, "Will this bring the community closer together or drive it apart?". That's why they ordnung will often permit cel phones, but only if they're in an out-building. This gives them the ability to quickly get help if needed, but not have their head down in the phone while the horses run in to a ditch.
TBF, the Amish have their flaws, but they're not the luddites you think they are. We could learn something from them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Friday March 24, @11:38AM
There's subtleties to everything. However, when you can explain how buttons vs. other forms of fasteners continue to be disallowed by most Amish groups (as a few allow them), I'll reconsider my position.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24, @01:32AM (1 child)
What I'm curious about is why are so many people nowadays so severely allergic to peanuts or intolerant of gluten? https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46302780 [bbc.com]
Not saying it's GMO. But is it the PFAS? And/or the plastics? Before the 1970s there weren't so many plastic residues around.
In the tests for safety it might be 99.99% safe (which still isn't that safe if you're going to apply it to 8 billion people).
Also they rarely test it on pregnant women... "Pregnant women should avoid consuming stuff with traces of BPA, PFAS, etc" good luck with that. 😉
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RamiK on Friday March 24, @11:16AM
Well, it's not GMO since there aren't any GMO peanuts in the market. In fact, the modern cultivars have mostly gone unchanged in the last 50 years or so the increase is unrelated to food engineering.
We don't know. People are getting fatter and less healthy all over the world... Some pollutants added while others are removed... Some cancers increase while others decrease... Some cultivars phase in and out of the market... Some allergies increase while others decrease... Infant mortality dropping means there's more sickly people around but abortions increasing means there's less severely sick people around... There's too many variables for it to any one thing.
I can tell you this much though: If you actually look up actual epidemiology literature like googling "increased prevalence celiac scholarly articles", you'll find the papers [wiley.com] make no mention of GMO or any of the specific chemicals we're talking about here. In fact, many of them suggest a lot of it is increased diagnosis. That is, modern tests are better and people are more aware due to the old mighty Google™️ so there's more cases being recorded which means doctors aren't even sure if there's really an increase in actual prevalence.
It's not to say the various plastics and PFAS are safe. They're not. However, the stuff they cause (mostly specific cancers) are well known and unrelated.
Regardless, mixing GMOs in all of this is doing a huge disservice to public health since conventional plant and livestock cultivation is worse for safety: When you do GMO, you get to focus on a single gene expression for safety studies so you have tight controls over cause and effect. When you do conventional cultivars safety studies, you have hundreds and thousands of randomly mutated genes working their way into your samples and all you can really do is feed the result to animals and people and note "doesn't seem to kill you immediately". That is, introducing anti-GMO legislation even if it's just labeling, is basically taking not just the food industry, but the science and discipline of food safety back 100 years to "well, it seems ok to me" since it removes the burden of proof from the industry to show the food is safe down to the consumers to show it's unsafe.
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday March 24, @03:54AM (1 child)
We get this story again. It's worth noting several things. First, DuPont paid a bunch of money to a lot of people. So there must have been something to the lawsuits they faced. Second, the story of "The Devil We know" has the Wilbur Tennant cattle story as a key part of it. That part is probably just ethylene glycol poisoning, or automotive antifreeze because it matches the symptoms experienced by the dying cattle and why so much green dye was present in environment and animals. Given the proximity of the cattle to the DuPont dumping grounds, this could have come from DuPont. Or it could have come from many other sources, including the farmer himself. Yet it always gets cast as PFOA/PFAS poisoning in these stories.
Finally, we have thousands of payouts (3500 last time I looked years ago), people who've been poisoned by PFOA at levels that probably get extremely high. The symptoms are significant - I read here of two notable birth defects out of seven pregnancies among DuPont workers as well as some degree of cancer. But some of these chemicals are being regulated down to nanogram per liter level. Shouldn't we be seeing far more harm in the most exposed group of employees if this is as dangerous as claimed?
My take is that we are seeing another pollution scare in the making. Maybe it'll be the next big thing after climate change or talc powder.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday March 24, @01:22PM
Or, it's something that's not easy to get rid of, which means any is too much. Whereas the seriously bad effects only happen to you, if you build up enough of them. Considering they will never breakdown in your body and could get stuck there. Any is way too much.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"