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: 1, Disagree) by Captival on Saturday April 13, @08:59PM (8 children)
Don't peaches fall of the tree and rot at some point regardless? If the water was that bad, they wouldn't have grown "perfect-looking" in the first place.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday April 13, @09:35PM (2 children)
Have the peaches, and soil where screened for PFA, some samples collected at where Nathan and Cordelia remember the sludge was dumped.
Maybe Mike Adams ( aka the "Health Ranger" is into this... I know he's very interested in this kind of thing. )
At least the testing of multiple samples ( some taken at location specified by Nathan and Cordelia ) along with some fruit would bring peace of mind. Interested neighbors invited too.
We don't need this kind of stuff showing up in the farmers market.
Being the sludge supposedly came from a paper factory, I doubt PFAS in the sludge. My take, chemically, it's similar to horse manure. But if people are that concerned, test and make sure. You never know how some people will solve a toxic waste disposal problem. Truck-and-dump is a lot cheaper than doing a job right...just find someone with permission to dump and mix it in.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 13, @09:53PM (1 child)
https://www.foodpackagingforum.org/news/studies-assess-pfas-opes-and-plasticizers-in-paper-board [foodpackagingforum.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday April 13, @10:40PM
Thanks!
I stand corrected. Considering food packaging these days... you're right!
It's paper reinforced plastic!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Saturday April 13, @10:01PM
Yes, they do. They were intentionally not harvested out of fear they were contaminated.
I doubt the peaches at the store are any better though.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday April 13, @10:08PM
The point was the neighbor left all the fruit unpicked until it fell and rotted. That's how I read it, anyway.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14, @03:32AM (1 child)
It's not impossible to be perfectly looking at maturity and die soon after of a disease.
(Score: 2) by cereal_burpist on Monday April 15, @04:51AM
Celebrities are a perfect example.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday April 15, @12:11AM
Just because a piece of fruit or jar of baby food looks perfect doesn't mean it's not poison.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday April 13, @11:35PM (37 children)
Notice the bolded part. Drinking water that's this heavily contaminated only resulted in a funky blood test result. When they wonder why some people fall ill and others don't? Perhaps because the chemicals are different - and maybe those other people were exposed to far more toxic chemicals at some point in their lives other than what's discussed here or merely had preexisting conditions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Sunday April 14, @01:50AM (3 children)
It would be nice if the units were consistent, perhaps parts per million. His blood concentration would then be 2 ppm. It would also be nice if some information on bio-accumulation and elimination rates were provided. It would be especially nice if there were reports on the actual toxicity of the chemicals (from animal tests); 2 ppm could be trivial or terrible.
It's good that this is being taken seriously and efforts are being made for cleanup.
That's scaremongering. Modern chemistry testing can be astonishingly sensitive, to the point that detectable contaminations could not possibly be dangerous.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 14, @02:03AM
If parts per million are molar, then due to the high molecular weight of typical PFAS, the two may be close. It's also possible that different chemicals can trigger that test component. In any case, it's indeed confusing.
With these stories, that's usually a point I have to make because they emphasize detectability rather than dose. Here, there was at least significant concentrations in blood and drinking water for a real world case.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14, @12:15PM (1 child)
Normal testosterone level. Males: 300 to 1,000 nanograms per deciliter, Females: 15 to 70 ng/dL [mountsinai.org]
1 deciliter = 100g - blood may be thicker than water, but its density is about the same.
300e-9/0.1 = 3ppm - not far from 2ppm
70e-9/0.1 = 0.7ppm - 2ppm makes 3 times more PFAS than testosterone in normal human females.
In vivo and in vitro studies have reported that PFASs can bind to nuclear receptors, such as estrogen receptors (ERs), androgen receptor (ARs) and thyroid hormone receptor (TRs); therefore, they are can alter steroidogenesis. [nih.gov]
Probably won't kill you, unless your thyroid goes busy growing metastatic - radioiodine and then hormone supplementation for the rest of your life, don't go swimming in the sea, iodine is not your friend after you left your thyroid behind.
But your demographics will likely become dependent on immigration of youngsters at reproductive age from countries with a lower exposure to PFAS. May speak a broken English.
Isn't google wonderful? Knowledge at your fingertips to make the "nice" you're asking for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15, @07:19AM
1 million * 70ng/100g = 0.0007ppm
1 million * 300ng/100g = 0.003ppm
I think my calculations make more sense.
Sanity check: 300ng/100g = 30ng /10g = 3ng per gram.
1 nanogram per gram = 1 gram per billion grams, or 0.001 gram per million grams = 0.001ppm.
So 3ng per gram = 0.003ppm.
Which makes the PFAS ppm values look even worse. They're not quite BAC levels yet but I think you'd want your PFAS levels to be many magnitudes lower than that, not just a few magnitudes.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Sunday April 14, @02:57AM (1 child)
We've got some controlled animal data for some of the chemicals, and epidemiological data for humans. This article is specific about which molecules they looked at.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7906952/ [nih.gov]
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday April 14, @03:53AM
thanks for the post. from the abstract of the article you linked: "Epidemiological studies have revealed associations between exposure to specific PFAS and 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."
which is what I had heard 3rd hand. I heard specifically about thyroid damage and troubles with hormones
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 14, @03:54AM (19 children)
>Has anyone bothered to show that there's an actual problem here?
Well, there was my Dad's canary who he left with a friend to watch on vacation, she cooked her breakfast on a Teflon pan and killed the canary... Coal miners had the good sense to take a hint from signs like that, and coal miners weren't known for being terribly risk averse.
https://www.petinsurance.com/healthzone/pet-health/pet-toxins/teflon-poisoning-in-birds/ [petinsurance.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 14, @04:23AM (18 children)
And that's supposed to mean something?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14, @05:33AM
The canary was delicious
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 14, @11:00AM (16 children)
Stated more directly: her cooking on the Teflon pan released toxins into the air which killed the canary. She also inhaled those toxins and, being essentially the same bio-machine as the canary, suffered similar systemic insults, but the human system is more robust and does not terminate immediately upon exposure, but instead limps on carrying these "forever chemicals" in our cells until death.
Why don't you have a cup of ethylene glycol for breakfast, it won't kill you either.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(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]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday April 14, @03:22PM (7 children)
Where were the fumes from? Burning food would release toxic fumes too and that's a more likely source.
You have yet to show that there were any "forever chemicals" involved in this alleged story.
Shows the profound ignorance of your narrative. Ethylene glycol quickly gets metabolized [wikipedia.org] into toxic chemicals that the body can eventually remove:
And there's no point to hoping that oxalic acid is a forever chemical either since it is present in a variety of vegetables such as asparagus. That indicates the body successfully removes that chemical from the body.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 14, @03:29PM (6 children)
>You have yet to show that there were any "forever chemicals" involved in this alleged story.
Open the link
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @12:13AM (5 children)
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 15, @01:22AM (4 children)
> the Teflon involved has broken down
You don't get "broken down Teflon poisoning" without having Teflon in the first place. 500F is actually a rather common temperature in parts of normal suburban, urban and rural human environments, and with ubiquitous Teflon around, it will be exposed to those high temperatures "accidentally" quite frequently.
First thing that comes to mind: make sure not to breathe any exhaust from an incinerating toilet: https://incineratingtoilets.com/ca/ [incineratingtoilets.com]
90 degree tangent, I was considering composting vs incinerating (aka flame) toilet for the cabin we were building, but before purchasing either one the flame toilet factory I was considering buying from burned down (no, I am not shitting you.) Makes the decision rather obvious. That was 20 years ago and it would appear someone has decided that the story needed to be buried deep on the internet, I see no references easily findable tonight.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday April 15, @02:42AM (3 children)
But not parts where your Teflon is. For example, the filament of an incandescent light bulb or the pilot light of a stove.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15, @08:35AM (2 children)
Pretty much any "self-cleaning" oven will reach well past that temperature.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @09:32PM
True, but it's not a typical use of ovens nor has a pile of Teflon inside.
(Score: 3, Touché) by tangomargarine on Tuesday April 23, @03:28PM
Note to self: don't use self-cleaning mode on my oven with Teflon pans inside
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 14, @05:07PM (10 children)
>studies show that PFAS may degrade health at a population level, why some individuals fall ill and others don't isn't always clear.
Transport your imagination 100 years in the future when we actually have studied the thousands of PFAS currently used indiscriminately in the markets (and thereby contaminated the environment with them) and found (just for argument's sake):
A) 1000 PFAS that cause immediate harm to all people at some dosage that could happen in normal usage.
B) 1000 others that "studies show that PFAS may degrade human health at a population level, why some individuals fall ill and others don't isn't always clear."
C) 1000 others still that were found to be harmless to humans during a five year followup monitoring, but could be extrapolated to possibly cause human harm based on animal studies
and D) 1000 PFAS that seem not to cause any health problems that we can determine. At least when studied individually, stay tuned for another thousand years to get the possible / probable combination exposure studies.
What's your threshold? Are you happy to subject the entire population to exposure of D, C, and B because your DuPont stock would go down if we didn't?
Where we are at today, we've got thousands of variations of PFAS "out there" with little to no data on most of them, except a couple that we know are bad news in large doses and not great in common chronic exposure levels for some people (class B).
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 14, @11:58PM (9 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 15, @01:01AM (8 children)
>If it takes a century to figure this out, then they weren't that dangerous in the first place.
Take a look at how your older friends / family (if you have any) are dying, and ask if it's normal for them to be going out like that? They'll certainly all be gone within the proposed century, and maybe it didn't have to be of cancer, diabetes, stroke and dementia.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @02:05AM (6 children)
Ok, what they're dying of appears quite tragically normal to me. None of the diseases you mention are abnormal either. I can't imagine what you think is normal? Would we live forever, if it weren't for our occasional contact with plastics? Somehow I doubt it. That means a normal death would still be from old age diseases and infirmities just like the above.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 15, @02:59AM (5 children)
My great grandfathers died mostly in their 30s, mostly from heart disease, mostly from diet and a bit from lifestyle (working the family farm, having large numbers of children, etc.)
My grandfathers took the hint and backed off the bacon a bit, they lived into their 70s. That's a nice choice to be able to make.
In 2003 we moved from Miami to Houston due to economic pressures out of our control and after arriving there, we did a fairly normal "Florida engineering family moves to Houston" about-face outta there in 2.5 years... see, after living there you start to learn about the overall regional increased risk of cancers and other early-nasty ends, you start to feel the tar dust settle on your cars every night... I watched an otherwise healthy coworker in his mid-40s check out due to "one of those cancer things, they happen sometimes." Yeah, but they do happen statistically significantly more in and around Houston. So, we chose not to expose ourselves and our children to that risk any longer than necessary. Moved to a radiotherapy company, where a grad student of one of the founders passed away at 24 of a "really rare blood cancer" just after completing his thesis on dosimetry measurement, including a lot of practical work around ionizing radiation sources. "Just one of those unpredictable things, they happen sometimes." Yeah. Oh, and a job I didn't take with a medical radio-isotope supplier replacing one of the two founding engineers who also passed away from cancer in his early 50s... Then we can talk about the dude whose father "did hot laundry" for the Savannah River facility: "they took real good care of mama after daddy passed." Just one of those things... I'm glad none of us are compulsorily tasked with work exposure to ionizing radiation, it seems like a good thing to opt out of, just as I opted out of a Navy scholarship for grad school which required a tour on a submarine after graduation, as well as job offers from Savannah River and the NRC.
Those are choices that my grandfathers and me and my family were free to make. "Opting out" of PFAS, BPA and so many other exposures in the modern world isn't actually economically possible, even for top 10% wealthy westerners, at least not without taking elevated risks from moving out of range of decent medical care, basic disease protections, etc. into the few remaining wild places, and even there - you've got microplastics and all kinds of other crap.
Nobody lives forever (yet) and I don't want to. I do want a good quality of life for as much of the quantity of life I do get. If I get told that I need to back off the bacon or I might take 10 years off my life... that's going to be a tough call for me. Opting out of me, my descendants, and everyone we meet living in ubiquitous PFAS soup? That's an option I'd really like to be available.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @04:31AM (4 children)
So what? You can't opt out of historical lead either. There's still detectable levels of lead in the environment from the era of the Roman empire. At some point, we have to get serious and prioritize this by harm. And that's the problem here. There's no demonstration of harm from these chemicals and microplastics. Merely being detectable in trace amounts is not harm.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 15, @11:23AM (3 children)
>So what? You can't opt out of historical lead either.
Actually, finally, we and the rest of the developed world did opt out of lead, asbestos, and many other ubiquitous environmental toxins that man-not-so-kind was spewing. No, we haven't completely undone the work of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. [wikipedia.org] and the men who decided they would profit as long as possible, right down to fighting tooth and nail in court to keep poisoning the population for profit.
Palm Beach County opted out of their Dutch technology waste incinerators when it became apparent that the Dutch population actually complies when instructed to not put mercury into the waste stream, apparently Palm Beach County does not because they were burning sufficient quantities of mercury to start killing the alligators in the everglades. That only took about 10 years to figure out and once demonstrated they did take appropriate action as quickly as practical, even if they had to pay a few dollars more and go back to landfilling their waste.
>There's no demonstration of harm from these chemicals and microplastics.
None that you accept, Perry Mason. I have a lower standard of proof when it comes to unknowns that may be killing people and wild animals.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @09:33PM (2 children)
Not because those could be detected in the environment, but because there were actual health consequences at the typical dosages seen.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 16, @01:55AM (1 child)
>but because there were actual health consequences at the typical dosages seen.
Actually, no. Billions of people were being exposed to lead from gasoline and the argument went something along the lines of "we are not all dead yet, the low doses have no proven detrimental effects.". Very similar to your argument against PFAS removal above. And that argument kept lead in gasoline for 21 years after Clair Patterson made the very strong case against it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Tuesday April 16, @02:21AM
Actually yes. Where's the evidence that you're right? Repeating narratives that worked before doesn't mean they will work this time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16, @03:36AM
Take a look at your younger friends too if you have any.
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/early-onset-cancer-in-younger-people-on-the-rise [yalemedicine.org]
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24093360/early-cancer-young-adults-colon-stomach-research [vox.com]
https://time.com/6960506/cancer-rates-young-people/ [time.com]
Whether it's due to diet or something else who knows.
FWIW I know a lot of the younger generation are actually cutting down on that soda and junkfood:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coca-cola-takes-swig-health-162410652.html [yahoo.com]
https://observer.com/2019/02/millennials-killing-coca-cola/ [observer.com]
Maybe something changed and the older generations are tougher than the newer ones.
See also: https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-diet-2017-10 [businessinsider.com]
OK that's not serious (there are always outliers).
BTW I think scientists should do some research on the ultra obese to try to find out if there's anything special (genes etc) in some of them that allows them to stay alive even as they get so fat. Many of us would be dead way before we hit 1000 pounds, much less stay alive for years/decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heaviest_people [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Touché) by Opportunist on Sunday April 14, @12:11AM (2 children)
The free market will sort that out!
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday April 14, @08:11AM (1 child)
Or politicians: If we stop testing for PFAS, we'd have very few cases of PFAS contamination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14, @12:27PM
Worked fine for COVID [nbcnews.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by pTamok on Sunday April 14, @05:21PM (1 child)
A small part of the issue here is that chemists had a tendency to think that highly-active chemistries were the ones likely to be harmful, and stable chemicals were likely to be benign. After all, the stable chemicals were not going to react* with anything.
However...enter the fun and games of organic steric chemistry [wikipedia.org] where the shape of the 'benign, unreactive' molecule becomes important. Which is why an unreactive (and therefore, difficult to dispose of) molecule has a shape that acts as an endocrine disrupter, hindering the proper action of one or several hormones.
And, to be fair, some of the chemistry of polyfluoridated molecules isn't as benign and unreactive as you might think. If only a part of a molecule uses the carbon-fluorine bonds, you get stuff like trifluroacetic acid [wikipedia.org], which, among other things, is used as a(n effective) wart remover. It's a strong acid. The trifluoroacetate ion is environmentally persistent.
So now we are conducting a global experiment to see what happens when the environment is generally contaminated with microplastics and persistent organic pollutants [wikipedia.org]. You can't avoid them. It's an epic, Biblical flood, not of water, but organic pollutants. And we don't currently have an ark.
We don't deserve this planet.
*Asbestos is pretty unreactive. Unfortunately, its properties have nasty effects in the lungs [wikipedia.org]. The normal chemicals used by the body to eliminate foreign substances have no effect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16, @03:41AM
Nowadays I also see indiscriminate use of Titanium Dioxide "everywhere".
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/25/nano-state-tiny-and-now-everywhere-how-big-a-problem-are-nanoparticles [theguardian.com]
It's not a 100% proven issue BUT it's really unnecessary in most of those cases. There's no real need for it in soap or toothpaste.