10 ms·

Scientists cut the tolerable intake of PFAs by 99.9%

146 points by laurex 8y ago

zazen 8y ago
There's better coverage of the lawsuit here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/3m-dupont-tussle-over-mega-lawsuit-on-cancer-linked-chemicals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/3m-dupont...
hedora 8y ago
PFAs = PFCs. Not sure why they renamed them. Maybe because PFCs have such a terrible reputation?
- mimixco 8y ago
  Also called PTFE, Teflon, and GenX. You can never get rid of the molecule (so they've found) but I guess you can try to get rid of the name?
  - icegreentea2 8y ago
    You're describing different things. Teflon is a brand name of PTFE, which is a finished polymer. PTFE is considered safe until it has been subject to heat stress and undergoes thermal breakdown (around 200C). This makes use of PTFE as non-stick coating in cookware potentially dangerous. GenX and PFOA are notionally different chemicals used in the manufacturing of PFTE. They are both used to accelerate the polymerization reaction. It is nominally possible to have finished PTFE products which do not contain relevant (choose your definition) amounts of either family of chemicals. GenX and PFOA are both toxic in themselves, regardless of use - unlike teflon.
    - mimixco 8y ago
      Yes, they're all different molecules but have the same essential characteristics which make them dangerous: namely, that they all cause cancers and birth defects and that they all pollute the water supply in a way that cannot be remediated.
ddebernardy 8y ago
For fellow Europeans who are also wondering if this might affect them too, one of the comments at the bottom of the article seems reassuring but is actually somewhat misleading, because the precautionary principle wasn't a general principle in EU law until late 2006. That being said, the EFSA is looking into the topic: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/press/news/181213 https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/press/news/181213
exitcode00 8y ago
Don't look now, but PFAs have been "replaced" with a chemical called "GenX." These companies will just shapeshift their toxic sludge every time a major suit is won. Sickening... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX
- woolvalley 8y ago
  I wonder if all the 'compostable' bio plastics you see in utentsils and some food packaging have the same problems or are safe.
  - exitcode00 8y ago
    Yes many of them are made with this junk, a lot of hygiene products have it too like "Oral-B" floss and even things like microwave popcorn bags... The more people realize the FDA does not care about us and learn to take personal action the better.
    - barrkel 8y ago
      Nobody has personal time or money to do the research required. We need some organization to centralize the work and indicate what's safe and what's not safe with enough robustness that unsafe products aren't easily sold to the unwary. We generally call these things government agencies, but any other body with the same function - private or public - will be susceptible to the same kinds of forces that government agencies are. All we can do is try and build institutions good processes, adversarial audits that ensure processes are followed, and mechanisms to adjust processes when they're found to be lacking. We generally call the latter mechanisms democracy. It's not great, but it's the best we've come up with.
      - exitcode00 8y ago
        Well, you'll end up with toxic drinking water with this attitude. I don't know what the right solution is, but saying you don't know enough at this point to throw out your teflon pans and avoid certain products and that you don't want to research things is lazy and ignorant. Citizen's levying large class-actions suits and making documentaries like "The Devil We Know" are perhaps the best tools we have to stop fascist corruption.
doctorpangloss 8y ago
Chemical companies are pretty much never the protagonists. Stories about green revolutions feeding lots of people or whatever are good tries at making the chemical company the good guy. But there will always be something impeachable about whatever it is that DuPont and 3M do. It sort of doesn't matter what the specifics of the toxicity are, which people will litigate here endlessly. So for once, consider that talking about the specifics of the toxicity is, fundamentally, co-opted by the antagonists of this scenario, because it sows confusion. Making it a science problem is attractive, but that line of problem solving is certainly perceived by the public to have long been hijacked by moneyed interests. Because if PFAs really caused cancer, or vaccines really caused autism, or pornography really caused massive amounts of violence against women or whatever--if it was really a hair on fire problem, we'd know. Air pollution really causes lung cancer, and it's seemingly invisible, but the hair on fire problem does exist there: visit Delhi. There, it's visible. In the United States, a lot of low hanging fruit has been addressed. So the kind of faucets-on-fire urgency that we saw with fracking is actually very rare nowadays. Yet we have a legacy environmental movement oriented too strongly around finding issues like that, that are capable of communicating only about issues like that. Ecoterrorism, class action lawsuits, big urban protests, reactionary political campaigns--it's great for getting rid of air pollution and visible disasters like that, but it's ineffective for stuff that's just a bunch of boring science. We'll eventually figure out how to litigate environmental problems. It won't at all resemble this preposterous adversarial trial and torts system. Goodnight to environmental lawyers, on both sides, despite their intentions. To keep this on topic for this forum, the person who figures out how to save the environment will definitely not be some grad student or $500k/year 50 y.o. industry MEng trying to make patentable inventions to get funded by VCs. People chasing the dollars are the environmental problem, after all. The people caught up in details of economics, law and scientific toxicity will just go away (i.e. technocrats) from this problem. We kind of already know that DuPont and 3M are guilty parties in something here. It won't be important to normal people what precisely corporate polluters are guilty of, because a normal person will never be on the wrong side of that justice equation.
- pathseeker 8y ago
  >because a normal person will never be on the wrong side of that justice equation. If someone uses a hammer to kill their spouse, the hammer manufacturer definitely is not on the wrong side of the justice equation and the person is.
mrfusion 8y ago
Do you think it helps to buy spring water for drinking? Our tap water just came out to have near the epa limit of pfas. (And the water company made it sound like a positive thing!)
- jimrandomh 8y ago
  Yes. Either that, or install a reverse osmosis filter on your tap.
  - usaphp 8y ago
    I’ve heard a lot of bad things about reverse osmosis water effects on your body as well.
    - philipkglass 8y ago
      I assume that you're referring to magnesium deficiency problems, e.g.: "Magnesium deficiency in tap water in Israel: The desalination era" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0011916417313401 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001191641... So, yes, make sure that you're supplementing magnesium or getting plenty from foods if you switch from plain tap water to RO or distilled water.
    - sorenn111 8y ago
      Just get a reverse osmosis system which remineralizes the water. Can be found on many good RO systems
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  It depends. Especially if by spring water you mean normal bottled water. Don't assume that their water quality will be water. In many cases, bottled water is worse than local water.
- dbcurtis 8y ago
  We bought a counter-top distiller 15+ years ago and are never going back. If fact, I think we have worn out 3 now. Highly recommend.
DenisM 8y ago
I think this might be more informative: https://www.doh.wa.gov/CommunityandEnvironment/Contaminants/PFAS#PFAS%20in%20Drinking%20Water https://www.doh.wa.gov/CommunityandEnvironment/Contaminants/... Also the headline overstates the content of the article by two orders of magnitude - article suggests 10x change to safe level while the headline stipulates 1000x.
mimixco 8y ago
Another story about Teflon! Why do these articles always bury the lede? Just say it's Telfon! There's a great documentary about this that came out last year called, The Devil We Know. The TL;DR is that Dupont (seller of Teflon) and 3M (the inventor) knew early on that Telfon caused birth defects and cancer. They knew it would poison the water supply and could never be remediated. And they went ahead and sold it, again and again, into thousands of products because Dupont was earning about $1B in profits (on their $23B in revenue) just from Teflon alone.
- kurthr 8y ago
  Because teflon is not by definition a PFA (PerfluoroAlkoxyAlkane). It is C2F4, while PFAs are C2F3O?? (where there is an oxygen cooridinated reactive fluoro group dangling off at the ??) Teflon is non-reactive and does not have these health issues. However PFAs can be byproducts of the manufacture of teflon, and they can be used in similar ways to teflon (they allow high temperature molding of corrosion resistant materials). The primary contamination issue is with this byproduct, particularly when it was manufactured, sold and used as a fire suppressing foam. The people who dumped that crap and covered it up deserve jail time, but uninformed fear mongering doesn't serve the public either.
  - mrfusion 8y ago
    So I can keep using my bread maker?
    - kurthr 8y ago
      Modern (last 10-20 years at least) commercial teflon is so low in PFAs that your exposure is likely dominated by what comes in your water :^\. I'd consider it at least as safe as the acrylamide coating your cast iron skillet. All of them are much safer than driving, but that frankly isn't very safe... since it's way up there on the list of things likely to kill you. Oh, but be careful with very high temperatures (500F+) frying, or dry boiling water pans. The teflon can break down and react with oxygen creating some of the same compounds. It has been known to kill birds!
  - 8y ago
fencepost 8y ago
As I understand it, most (all?) nonstick coatings on pans are chemicals in this general category - some variant of fluorine compounds that hold together well. The biggest problem particularly with older ones is that they start to get less stable as heat gets higher - like it may if you leave an empty nonstick pan over a burner, where it can give off fumes that are particularly toxic to pet birds. Avoiding those compounds likely accounts for at least some of the increased trendiness of cast iron in the past decade or two, including the increase in new "artisanal" cast iron makers like Stargazer, Finex, Butter Pat, Smithey, Field Co and probably a few others (for reviews of a bunch of those, check out Kent Rollins on Youtube). There's also quite a bit of information on improving/smoothing less expensive cast iron.
- lkrubner 8y ago
  Also, cast iron is known to cure anemia in women, and it has been tested for thousands of years and is well understood. It is not experimental. Also, really, how hard is it to put some oil in a pan and let that coat the pan before you start cooking? My friends complain that their food burns in an iron pan, which I think is a surprising complaint. The solution to burning has been known for centuries: just put some oil or butter in the pan, and use a reasonable flame.
  - woolvalley 8y ago
    It's about saving time and work. Cast iron takes a lot of work compared to even plain old stainless steel plans in prep and cleaning. They are very heavy to handle and can't use such foods as tomatoes because they are too acidic. An informal survey as to why you would use a cast iron is "it make meat taste better" and it "heats more evenly".
    - jacobush 8y ago
      I used to believe that cast iron were more work, but I moved house, got a (cheap, $20) cast iron pan - and it's less work. I t sticks less than non-stick pans. Very notable when frying eggs. I hadn't have an egg stick yet, while I had it all the time in the non-stick. Also, you can be rough with metal tools without worrying about damaging the non stick coating. And can overheat without damaging the pan. It's also easy to clean, if you get over the impulse to use detergent. Just clean it in hot water and then a towel or paper towel. If one uses detergent, it needs to be oil coated and heated again, which is annoying. I'll never use anything but cast iron again. It is heavy though.
iso1337 8y ago
PFOA/PFAs are also widely used as DWR (Durable Water Repellant) for clothing. Even Patagonia still uses chemicals in this class (or did as of 2015): https://www.patagonia.com/blog/2015/03/our-dwr-problem/ https://www.patagonia.com/blog/2015/03/our-dwr-problem/ More reading here: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/ski-clothing-waterproof-pfoa-pfcs-perfluourochemicals-health-risks/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/ski-clothing...
StopClickBait 8y ago
For those wondering PFA/PFOS="poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances" As an article seeking to get this message out about the PFA court case, perhaps you are justified, however this should have been your starting point: "The chemicals used as criteria in the suit are called PFASs (pronounced “pee-fass”), and are unregulated at the federal level. [The suit asserts that these chemicals are found in 98% of Americans today]. In June, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued an updated draft toxicological profile for PFASs. For drinking water, [the report recommends an] acceptable concentration of 7 parts per trillion of PFOS and 11 parts per trillion for PFOA, according to Laurel Schaider, a research scientist at the Silent Spring Institute. Right now, the EPA’s 2016 guidelines set an acceptable drinking water concentration for PFOA and PFOS at 70 parts per trillion, about ten times higher than the draft report’s thresholds. ... by the standards in the ATSDR report, a PFASs exposure greater than approximately two thousandth (0.002) of a drop [of water] in the average yearly water intake of an American adult could be considered potentially unsafe" EPA limits (which are usually the federal action limit, not a recommended consumption limit): https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/data-statistics/plain-water-the-healthier-choice.html https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/data-statistics/plain-water-th...
newnewpdro 8y ago
I recently saw a local notice about PFAs and their voluminous use in firefighting foams at the nearby military bases and airports. Apparently it was making its way into the drinking water. The wikipedia page has some information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighting_foam#Environmental_and_health_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighting_foam#Environmenta...
- jabl 8y ago
  See also https://theintercept.com/2015/12/16/toxic-firefighting-foam-has-contaminated-u-s-drinking-water-with-pfcs/ https://theintercept.com/2015/12/16/toxic-firefighting-foam-... https://theintercept.com/2018/02/10/firefighting-foam-afff-pfos-pfoa-epa/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/10/firefighting-foam-afff-p... Part of a 21-part series at https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/ https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/
contingencies 8y ago
Ceramic nonstick cookware. Heavier, but does the same job. https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/61420/what-is-the-chemical-structure-of-ceramic-nonstick-coating-on-pans#69334 https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/61420/what-is-...
anonuser123456 8y ago
For the parents in the audience, carpet is a major exposure path for young children. Anything stain resistant (carpet/appulstry etc) has it (most carpet). Abrasian from ordinary usage causes it to be released in the form of dust. Toddlers, due to their proximity to the ground and propensity to put their hands in their mouths, are particularly susceptible. Better living through chemistry!
kristofferR 8y ago
Wow, what an interesting coincidence: https://i.imgur.com/IPqwYGQ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/IPqwYGQ.jpg I was just reading about fluorides in ski wax, and all the problems associated with it and the upcoming EU ban, then I browsed HN and found this story on top.
bartread 8y ago
I find I have very little patience for breathless articles that include acronyms in their headline and fail to clearly define those acronyms within the first paragraph. This article therefore lands hard in the waste bin. However, if you're interested, PFA stands for perfluoroalkoxy polymer. Wikipedia has information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluoroalkoxy_alkane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluoroalkoxy_alkane
- freehunter 8y ago
  This is a much better Wikipedia article on the subject, one that actually explains why it's so dangerous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanesulfonic_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanesulfonic_acid There are major swaths of the country where PFAS and PFOS doesn't need to be defined: it's common knowledge and the terms see daily use among the general population as they drink filtered water to avoid ingesting it. But spelling out the name doesn't tell you the story, so if you're discounting the information because the name isn't spelled out, you're missing a major disaster slow-rolling the industrial Midwest right now. The long form of the name is the least interesting part of the article.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  Amen. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorinated_compound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorinated_compound => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorosurfactant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorosurfactant Here's a 2018 ATSDR study : https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp.asp?id=1117&tid=237 https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp.asp?id=1117&tid=237 Effects of Perfluorinated alkylate substances in children (2017) : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1547691X.2017.1360968 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1547691X.2017.13...
jabl 8y ago
For a (much!) longer read about this stuff, the intercept has a 21-part series here: https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/ https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/
nate_meurer 8y ago
A major source of PFAS contamination is military bases. There are hundreds of U.S. Air Force and Navy installations with fire and crash training sites, where they literally dump thousands of gallons of PFAS-laden fire fighting foam on the ground during exercises. A combination of brain-dead military leadership and intensive lobbying by DuPont, Chemours, and others. The Intercept has done some excellent reporting on this issue: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/10/firefighting-foam-afff-pfos-pfoa-epa/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/10/firefighting-foam-afff-p...
bigmit37 8y ago
Any books I can read on non-toxic living? These days I feel like they are a lot of toxic substances in our everyday products that should be substituted for cleaner versions but I am not aware of all of them. Is there a useful book on this subject? Last year I read about pm2.5 in our air and have gotten some sensors and air purifier to combat this particular problem.
arobuck 8y ago
Hi all, Quick note: the headline is from a Massive Lab Note (https://massivesci.com/notes/scientists-just-cut-the-tolerable-intake-of-pfas-by-99-9/ https://massivesci.com/notes/scientists-just-cut-the-tolerab...), while the link above is pulling from an Oct 2018 article related to an ongoing US health study about safe limits of several PFASs. I skimmed comments below briefly--PFASs are used as processing components to create non-stick cookware. They can be emitted directly from the cookware as Teflon breaks down, becomes scratched, or is overheated. The "legacy" PFASs have been largely phased out, with replacements like GenX taking their place. These replacements offer similar toxicological consequences compared to "original" PFASs.

146 points by laurex 8y ago

There's better coverage of the lawsuit here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/3m-dupont-tussle-over-mega-lawsuit-on-cancer-linked-chemicals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/3m-dupont...

hedora 8y ago

PFAs = PFCs. Not sure why they renamed them. Maybe because PFCs have such a terrible reputation?

mimixco 8y ago
Also called PTFE, Teflon, and GenX. You can never get rid of the molecule (so they've found) but I guess you can try to get rid of the name?
- icegreentea2 8y ago
  You're describing different things. Teflon is a brand name of PTFE, which is a finished polymer. PTFE is considered safe until it has been subject to heat stress and undergoes thermal breakdown (around 200C). This makes use of PTFE as non-stick coating in cookware potentially dangerous. GenX and PFOA are notionally different chemicals used in the manufacturing of PFTE. They are both used to accelerate the polymerization reaction. It is nominally possible to have finished PTFE products which do not contain relevant (choose your definition) amounts of either family of chemicals. GenX and PFOA are both toxic in themselves, regardless of use - unlike teflon.
  - mimixco 8y ago
    Yes, they're all different molecules but have the same essential characteristics which make them dangerous: namely, that they all cause cancers and birth defects and that they all pollute the water supply in a way that cannot be remediated.

ddebernardy 8y ago

For fellow Europeans who are also wondering if this might affect them too, one of the comments at the bottom of the article seems reassuring but is actually somewhat misleading, because the precautionary principle wasn't a general principle in EU law until late 2006. That being said, the EFSA is looking into the topic: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/press/news/181213 https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/press/news/181213

exitcode00 8y ago

Don't look now, but PFAs have been "replaced" with a chemical called "GenX." These companies will just shapeshift their toxic sludge every time a major suit is won. Sickening... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX

woolvalley 8y ago
I wonder if all the 'compostable' bio plastics you see in utentsils and some food packaging have the same problems or are safe.
- exitcode00 8y ago
  Yes many of them are made with this junk, a lot of hygiene products have it too like "Oral-B" floss and even things like microwave popcorn bags... The more people realize the FDA does not care about us and learn to take personal action the better.
  - barrkel 8y ago
    Nobody has personal time or money to do the research required. We need some organization to centralize the work and indicate what's safe and what's not safe with enough robustness that unsafe products aren't easily sold to the unwary. We generally call these things government agencies, but any other body with the same function - private or public - will be susceptible to the same kinds of forces that government agencies are. All we can do is try and build institutions good processes, adversarial audits that ensure processes are followed, and mechanisms to adjust processes when they're found to be lacking. We generally call the latter mechanisms democracy. It's not great, but it's the best we've come up with.
    - exitcode00 8y ago
      Well, you'll end up with toxic drinking water with this attitude. I don't know what the right solution is, but saying you don't know enough at this point to throw out your teflon pans and avoid certain products and that you don't want to research things is lazy and ignorant. Citizen's levying large class-actions suits and making documentaries like "The Devil We Know" are perhaps the best tools we have to stop fascist corruption.

doctorpangloss 8y ago

Chemical companies are pretty much never the protagonists. Stories about green revolutions feeding lots of people or whatever are good tries at making the chemical company the good guy. But there will always be something impeachable about whatever it is that DuPont and 3M do. It sort of doesn't matter what the specifics of the toxicity are, which people will litigate here endlessly. So for once, consider that talking about the specifics of the toxicity is, fundamentally, co-opted by the antagonists of this scenario, because it sows confusion. Making it a science problem is attractive, but that line of problem solving is certainly perceived by the public to have long been hijacked by moneyed interests. Because if PFAs really caused cancer, or vaccines really caused autism, or pornography really caused massive amounts of violence against women or whatever--if it was really a hair on fire problem, we'd know. Air pollution really causes lung cancer, and it's seemingly invisible, but the hair on fire problem does exist there: visit Delhi. There, it's visible. In the United States, a lot of low hanging fruit has been addressed. So the kind of faucets-on-fire urgency that we saw with fracking is actually very rare nowadays. Yet we have a legacy environmental movement oriented too strongly around finding issues like that, that are capable of communicating only about issues like that. Ecoterrorism, class action lawsuits, big urban protests, reactionary political campaigns--it's great for getting rid of air pollution and visible disasters like that, but it's ineffective for stuff that's just a bunch of boring science. We'll eventually figure out how to litigate environmental problems. It won't at all resemble this preposterous adversarial trial and torts system. Goodnight to environmental lawyers, on both sides, despite their intentions. To keep this on topic for this forum, the person who figures out how to save the environment will definitely not be some grad student or $500k/year 50 y.o. industry MEng trying to make patentable inventions to get funded by VCs. People chasing the dollars are the environmental problem, after all. The people caught up in details of economics, law and scientific toxicity will just go away (i.e. technocrats) from this problem. We kind of already know that DuPont and 3M are guilty parties in something here. It won't be important to normal people what precisely corporate polluters are guilty of, because a normal person will never be on the wrong side of that justice equation.

pathseeker 8y ago
>because a normal person will never be on the wrong side of that justice equation. If someone uses a hammer to kill their spouse, the hammer manufacturer definitely is not on the wrong side of the justice equation and the person is.

mrfusion 8y ago

Do you think it helps to buy spring water for drinking? Our tap water just came out to have near the epa limit of pfas. (And the water company made it sound like a positive thing!)

jimrandomh 8y ago
Yes. Either that, or install a reverse osmosis filter on your tap.
- usaphp 8y ago
  I’ve heard a lot of bad things about reverse osmosis water effects on your body as well.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    I assume that you're referring to magnesium deficiency problems, e.g.: "Magnesium deficiency in tap water in Israel: The desalination era" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0011916417313401 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001191641... So, yes, make sure that you're supplementing magnesium or getting plenty from foods if you switch from plain tap water to RO or distilled water.
  - sorenn111 8y ago
    Just get a reverse osmosis system which remineralizes the water. Can be found on many good RO systems
b_tterc_p 8y ago
It depends. Especially if by spring water you mean normal bottled water. Don't assume that their water quality will be water. In many cases, bottled water is worse than local water.
dbcurtis 8y ago
We bought a counter-top distiller 15+ years ago and are never going back. If fact, I think we have worn out 3 now. Highly recommend.

DenisM 8y ago

I think this might be more informative: https://www.doh.wa.gov/CommunityandEnvironment/Contaminants/PFAS#PFAS%20in%20Drinking%20Water https://www.doh.wa.gov/CommunityandEnvironment/Contaminants/... Also the headline overstates the content of the article by two orders of magnitude - article suggests 10x change to safe level while the headline stipulates 1000x.

mimixco 8y ago

Another story about Teflon! Why do these articles always bury the lede? Just say it's Telfon! There's a great documentary about this that came out last year called, The Devil We Know. The TL;DR is that Dupont (seller of Teflon) and 3M (the inventor) knew early on that Telfon caused birth defects and cancer. They knew it would poison the water supply and could never be remediated. And they went ahead and sold it, again and again, into thousands of products because Dupont was earning about $1B in profits (on their $23B in revenue) just from Teflon alone.

kurthr 8y ago
Because teflon is not by definition a PFA (PerfluoroAlkoxyAlkane). It is C2F4, while PFAs are C2F3O?? (where there is an oxygen cooridinated reactive fluoro group dangling off at the ??) Teflon is non-reactive and does not have these health issues. However PFAs can be byproducts of the manufacture of teflon, and they can be used in similar ways to teflon (they allow high temperature molding of corrosion resistant materials). The primary contamination issue is with this byproduct, particularly when it was manufactured, sold and used as a fire suppressing foam. The people who dumped that crap and covered it up deserve jail time, but uninformed fear mongering doesn't serve the public either.
- mrfusion 8y ago
  So I can keep using my bread maker?
  - kurthr 8y ago
    Modern (last 10-20 years at least) commercial teflon is so low in PFAs that your exposure is likely dominated by what comes in your water :^\. I'd consider it at least as safe as the acrylamide coating your cast iron skillet. All of them are much safer than driving, but that frankly isn't very safe... since it's way up there on the list of things likely to kill you. Oh, but be careful with very high temperatures (500F+) frying, or dry boiling water pans. The teflon can break down and react with oxygen creating some of the same compounds. It has been known to kill birds!
- 8y ago

fencepost 8y ago

As I understand it, most (all?) nonstick coatings on pans are chemicals in this general category - some variant of fluorine compounds that hold together well. The biggest problem particularly with older ones is that they start to get less stable as heat gets higher - like it may if you leave an empty nonstick pan over a burner, where it can give off fumes that are particularly toxic to pet birds. Avoiding those compounds likely accounts for at least some of the increased trendiness of cast iron in the past decade or two, including the increase in new "artisanal" cast iron makers like Stargazer, Finex, Butter Pat, Smithey, Field Co and probably a few others (for reviews of a bunch of those, check out Kent Rollins on Youtube). There's also quite a bit of information on improving/smoothing less expensive cast iron.

lkrubner 8y ago
Also, cast iron is known to cure anemia in women, and it has been tested for thousands of years and is well understood. It is not experimental. Also, really, how hard is it to put some oil in a pan and let that coat the pan before you start cooking? My friends complain that their food burns in an iron pan, which I think is a surprising complaint. The solution to burning has been known for centuries: just put some oil or butter in the pan, and use a reasonable flame.
- woolvalley 8y ago
  It's about saving time and work. Cast iron takes a lot of work compared to even plain old stainless steel plans in prep and cleaning. They are very heavy to handle and can't use such foods as tomatoes because they are too acidic. An informal survey as to why you would use a cast iron is "it make meat taste better" and it "heats more evenly".
  - jacobush 8y ago
    I used to believe that cast iron were more work, but I moved house, got a (cheap, $20) cast iron pan - and it's less work. I t sticks less than non-stick pans. Very notable when frying eggs. I hadn't have an egg stick yet, while I had it all the time in the non-stick. Also, you can be rough with metal tools without worrying about damaging the non stick coating. And can overheat without damaging the pan. It's also easy to clean, if you get over the impulse to use detergent. Just clean it in hot water and then a towel or paper towel. If one uses detergent, it needs to be oil coated and heated again, which is annoying. I'll never use anything but cast iron again. It is heavy though.

iso1337 8y ago

PFOA/PFAs are also widely used as DWR (Durable Water Repellant) for clothing. Even Patagonia still uses chemicals in this class (or did as of 2015): https://www.patagonia.com/blog/2015/03/our-dwr-problem/ https://www.patagonia.com/blog/2015/03/our-dwr-problem/ More reading here: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/ski-clothing-waterproof-pfoa-pfcs-perfluourochemicals-health-risks/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/ski-clothing...

StopClickBait 8y ago

For those wondering PFA/PFOS="poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances" As an article seeking to get this message out about the PFA court case, perhaps you are justified, however this should have been your starting point: "The chemicals used as criteria in the suit are called PFASs (pronounced “pee-fass”), and are unregulated at the federal level. [The suit asserts that these chemicals are found in 98% of Americans today]. In June, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued an updated draft toxicological profile for PFASs. For drinking water, [the report recommends an] acceptable concentration of 7 parts per trillion of PFOS and 11 parts per trillion for PFOA, according to Laurel Schaider, a research scientist at the Silent Spring Institute. Right now, the EPA’s 2016 guidelines set an acceptable drinking water concentration for PFOA and PFOS at 70 parts per trillion, about ten times higher than the draft report’s thresholds. ... by the standards in the ATSDR report, a PFASs exposure greater than approximately two thousandth (0.002) of a drop [of water] in the average yearly water intake of an American adult could be considered potentially unsafe" EPA limits (which are usually the federal action limit, not a recommended consumption limit): https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/data-statistics/plain-water-the-healthier-choice.html https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/data-statistics/plain-water-th...

newnewpdro 8y ago

I recently saw a local notice about PFAs and their voluminous use in firefighting foams at the nearby military bases and airports. Apparently it was making its way into the drinking water. The wikipedia page has some information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighting_foam#Environmental_and_health_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighting_foam#Environmenta...

jabl 8y ago
See also https://theintercept.com/2015/12/16/toxic-firefighting-foam-has-contaminated-u-s-drinking-water-with-pfcs/ https://theintercept.com/2015/12/16/toxic-firefighting-foam-... https://theintercept.com/2018/02/10/firefighting-foam-afff-pfos-pfoa-epa/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/10/firefighting-foam-afff-p... Part of a 21-part series at https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/ https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/

contingencies 8y ago

Ceramic nonstick cookware. Heavier, but does the same job. https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/61420/what-is-the-chemical-structure-of-ceramic-nonstick-coating-on-pans#69334 https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/61420/what-is-...

anonuser123456 8y ago

For the parents in the audience, carpet is a major exposure path for young children. Anything stain resistant (carpet/appulstry etc) has it (most carpet). Abrasian from ordinary usage causes it to be released in the form of dust. Toddlers, due to their proximity to the ground and propensity to put their hands in their mouths, are particularly susceptible. Better living through chemistry!

kristofferR 8y ago

Wow, what an interesting coincidence: https://i.imgur.com/IPqwYGQ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/IPqwYGQ.jpg I was just reading about fluorides in ski wax, and all the problems associated with it and the upcoming EU ban, then I browsed HN and found this story on top.

bartread 8y ago

I find I have very little patience for breathless articles that include acronyms in their headline and fail to clearly define those acronyms within the first paragraph. This article therefore lands hard in the waste bin. However, if you're interested, PFA stands for perfluoroalkoxy polymer. Wikipedia has information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluoroalkoxy_alkane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluoroalkoxy_alkane

freehunter 8y ago
This is a much better Wikipedia article on the subject, one that actually explains why it's so dangerous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanesulfonic_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanesulfonic_acid There are major swaths of the country where PFAS and PFOS doesn't need to be defined: it's common knowledge and the terms see daily use among the general population as they drink filtered water to avoid ingesting it. But spelling out the name doesn't tell you the story, so if you're discounting the information because the name isn't spelled out, you're missing a major disaster slow-rolling the industrial Midwest right now. The long form of the name is the least interesting part of the article.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Amen. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorinated_compound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorinated_compound => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorosurfactant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorosurfactant Here's a 2018 ATSDR study : https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp.asp?id=1117&tid=237 https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp.asp?id=1117&tid=237 Effects of Perfluorinated alkylate substances in children (2017) : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1547691X.2017.1360968 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1547691X.2017.13...

jabl 8y ago

For a (much!) longer read about this stuff, the intercept has a 21-part series here: https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/ https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/

nate_meurer 8y ago

A major source of PFAS contamination is military bases. There are hundreds of U.S. Air Force and Navy installations with fire and crash training sites, where they literally dump thousands of gallons of PFAS-laden fire fighting foam on the ground during exercises. A combination of brain-dead military leadership and intensive lobbying by DuPont, Chemours, and others. The Intercept has done some excellent reporting on this issue: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/10/firefighting-foam-afff-pfos-pfoa-epa/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/10/firefighting-foam-afff-p...

bigmit37 8y ago

Any books I can read on non-toxic living? These days I feel like they are a lot of toxic substances in our everyday products that should be substituted for cleaner versions but I am not aware of all of them. Is there a useful book on this subject? Last year I read about pm2.5 in our air and have gotten some sensors and air purifier to combat this particular problem.

arobuck 8y ago

Hi all, Quick note: the headline is from a Massive Lab Note (https://massivesci.com/notes/scientists-just-cut-the-tolerable-intake-of-pfas-by-99-9/ https://massivesci.com/notes/scientists-just-cut-the-tolerab...), while the link above is pulling from an Oct 2018 article related to an ongoing US health study about safe limits of several PFASs. I skimmed comments below briefly--PFASs are used as processing components to create non-stick cookware. They can be emitted directly from the cookware as Teflon breaks down, becomes scratched, or is overheated. The "legacy" PFASs have been largely phased out, with replacements like GenX taking their place. These replacements offer similar toxicological consequences compared to "original" PFASs.