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Blood testing has emerged as a sticking point. Specifically, a growing movement of veterans and others, united in advocacy groups with names like Fountain Valle
by apo 8y ago
Blood testing has emerged as a sticking point. Specifically, a growing movement of veterans and others, united in advocacy groups with names like Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition and Need Our Water, are asking the military test their blood for the chemicals, hoping to bring results to their doctors or use them in lawsuits.
Strange that the article is being so cagey about why this might be the case.
Every human blood sample tested since the 1950s has shown detectable perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA aka C8, a member of the PFAS class of chemicals mentioned in the article). The problem was so bad that DuPont had to search high and low for blood samples that weren't contaminated with PFOA. They did eventually find clean samples - archived from a group of recruits for the Korean War.
A little about the chemistry. Think of most forms of grease as a greasy, long, water-repellant chain of carbon-hydrogen bonds attached to a small water-attractive "polar" head. PFASs replace all of the carbon-hydrogen bonds in the greasy tail with carbon-fluorine bonds. This makes the molecule repel grease (great for non-stick coatings throughout the house). But the carbon-fluroene bond is quite inert, thus the name "forever chemical." There are few environmental mechanisms that can degrade them - either exposed or inside a body.
This article fails to put the problem into proper context - making it sound unique to military bases. That not true. PFOA is a problem at numerous sites. Nobody knows the long-term consequences of releasing this much highly-inert, carcinogenic material into the environment. What is known is that those unfortunate enough to have worked on PFOA production and who received high exposure to it developed horrific problems including cancers.
The Intercept did a massive series on this:
https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/ https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/
The Netflix documentary "The Devil We Know" is also worth watching:
https://www.netflix.com/title/80997719 https://www.netflix.com/title/80997719
- Spooky23 8y agoThe military has a long history of dumping toxic crap and handling substances with at best negligence.
- mirimir 8y agoYes. It's not just military bases. But it's worse, because it's not just PFAS. There are probably 10^5-10^6 chemicals in commercial use. Many of them are persistent. Maybe not "forever chemicals", but persistent enough to be problematic. And we're all carrying them in our fat. Rather like global climate change, it's just too late.
- whalabi 8y ago> This article fails to put the problem into proper context - making it sound unique to military bases From the article: > While the military has used the chemicals extensively, it is far from the only entity to do so, and in recent years, companies like DuPont have come under fire for leaching PFAS into water systems.
- CptFribble 8y agoAnother very interesting long-form article on the C8 thing: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-beautiful-parkersburg/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...
- amelius 8y agoThat's a nice explanation. But what I don't get is: if the chemical is highly inert that means it doesn't react easily with other substances, so how then can it be carcinogenic?
- coryrc 8y agoSomething doesn't need to react to influence the environment; it can act as a catalyst, cause damage physically, or bring smaller things with it pass defenses.
- cell_death 8y agoAnything that promotes cell death, and/or division it probably carcinogenic. Figure cellular membranes are sensitive to intracellular volume, ergo, pack a cell with inert space filling molecules that never leave, and are not evacuated, and the cell splits more readily, faster than usual. Also, because it doesn't react, it probably creates obstacles and cytoplasmic traffic jams, as objects traverse the endoplasmic reticulum, if timing is thrown off for critical functions, the cell probably dies, due to improperly tuned pathways that don't signal each other properly, leading to flame-outs, stalls and caustic burns or wasted energy inside the cell.
- kbenson 8y agoIt doesn't react chemically but is useful for its physical properties, which means it does influence the environment it's in in that manner. I wouldn't rule it out as carcinogenic because it's mostly chemically inert because of the same reasoning, namely that there are other ways it may change the environment than chemically.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- roywiggins 8y agoAsbestos causes cancer like this, more or less, I think. It's not like silica is inherently toxic.