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There is not strong evidence that the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to cause any health issues at all. It is, of course, concerning. Nobody likes the i

There is not strong evidence that the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to cause any health issues at all. It is, of course, concerning. Nobody likes the idea of materials building up in their bodies. But we can't say they knew they were hurting many people, because we still don't.

akaru 3y ago
Yet a drug—that people willingly and optionally take as opposed to this—must be proven NOT to create harm before it is allowed in the wild. Your argument sounds like it is in bad faith.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > must be proven NOT to create harm before it is allowed in the wild This isn’t how we regulate chemicals in America. Perhaps it should be.
  - hyperdimension 3y ago
    I think that that was the implication. We should elevate the standard for new chemicals that might enter our body through the environment to a similar standard we already have for drugs (chemicals we deliberately put into our body.)
  - rayiner 3y ago
    To my knowledge, that’s not how we regulate industrial chemicals anywhere. I agree it probably should be. Those chemists are witch doctors.
  - lazide 3y ago
    I’m not sure how that is even possible, frankly. What sort of test suite would THAT look like?
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  You are conflating very different things. Go into any Whole Foods and there is an entire aisle of pills that are not proven to not create harm, in fact, some of them most certainly do. Pharmaceuticals play by a different set of rules than other chemicals because humans are particularly gullible when it comes to health claims. "Snake oil salesman" is a common term for a reason. We don't let big pharma make certain claims without ample test data for a whole host of obvious reasons. In this context we were talking about punishing people for "harming" without having proven that they've really harmed at all. This would be more like locking up all the Chinese restaurant owners for using MSG. Your argument sounds like it is in bad logic.
  - zug_zug 3y ago
    That really feels like a bad-faith and misinformed comparison. Can you please at least do a very basic amount of research before you take sides on this? Perhaps watch a documentary (e.g. the devil we know) or read at least 1 wikipedia article -- it was clear from the outset that workers at these factories were giving birth to children with birth-defects for example. [1] These companies had engineers who were actively concerned about its health effects, circulating internal memos to that effect [1], but just because there wasn't a finalized published study are able to claim "well.... it's not proooooven technically for 100% sure to be bad for you in small doses..." Of course small doses of anything can take a decade to be proven harmful to newborn children. These are now being linked to ADHD, that's something that takes years of very intentional research to find (because how old does a kid have to be to get that diagnosis). https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/05/425451/makers-pfas-forever-chemicals-covered-dangers https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/05/425451/makers-pfas-forever...
    - mattmaroon 3y ago
      Documentaries are not research. I have read countless actual papers on this. You can find them online. I am not taking the side you think I am, you simply are reading things into what I said that aren’t there. I am sure 3M did awful things. I am sure high levels of the stuff are dangerous, certain occupations were exposed to it at dangerous levels, the company willingly ignored that. I’m sure they deserve this fine. Fines of this magnitude hit corporations where they live in the way that jailing a COO cannot. I just think “mass harm” is not proven. Perhaps some simply define that differently than I do, I don’t consider the relatively tiny amounts of factory workers impacted to be mass harm. Awful, sure. But the hysteria about this, and what I think most people are talking about when they use that term, is the level all of us are exposed to via drinking water, food packaging, etc. There’s simply no proof (or even solid evidence) of mass harm by that definition, just hysteria. Proof may arrive one day, I do not know. As you point out, it may take years or even decades. (Though it has been around nearly a century, and in large quantities for some time.) The word “linked” is always common in bunk science. When you see that frequently on any topic, you can be sure there’s hysteria. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect every chemical manufactured (they all can end up in water systems) to be clinically tested. Those chemicals are too important to modern life to yank them all. There are too many.
- rayiner 3y ago
  Every single western society takes a different approach to drugs that people directly ingest and industrial chemicals that might build up in peoples’ bodies. The calculus seems to be that people would rather have better non-stick pans and are okay with a few more people dying from them. You might disagree with that, but OP is just stating what’s apparently common sense. That’s the exact opposite of “bad faith.”
  - lazide 3y ago
    Well, people buy non stick pans despite there being evidence people may die from it, so I’d say the evidence is strongly in your favor.
    - mattmaroon 3y ago
      My girlfriend is simultaneously outraged that there are PFAs in the water supply and has entire sets of pans that are disintegrating Teflon that she even puts in the dishwasher. When I point out the irony she shrugs.
      - lazide 3y ago
        A good description of the current state of society if I’ve ever heard one.
- lazide 3y ago
  That is definitely not the bar for drugs, or most drugs would not be allowed to be sold. The FDA requires that drugs provably and consistently have an effect, and that side effects are generally well known and not excessively bad so as to outweigh the benefits. Drugs without known side effects are the worst in the eyes of the FDA (except those with no redeeming properties whatsoever anyway), because it doesn’t allow for manageable prescribing. If they were proven to be safe, they wouldn’t require a prescription and would be sold over the counter. Though even that bar isn’t really required, or St. John’s Wort, Tylenol, etc. wouldn’t be allowed to be sold.
cpncrunch 3y ago
Most of the comments here are highly disturbing, bring out the pitchforks. Its sad that this is on HN.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  Most people don’t know the difference between a Netflix documentary and research.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    [flagged]
forgetfreeman 3y ago
Absolute nonsense. We've known since at least the 90s that this shit posed significant health risks. See Also: Parkersburg, West Virginia.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  We can be reasonably certain that very high exposure is harmful, yes. Only a small percent of the population achieved that level of exposure, thankfully.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    Things we know: high concentrations are catastrophically harmful, it persists in the environment indefinitely, and this shit is bio accumulative. That should be the end of any discussion about product safety.
    - fingerlocks 3y ago
      Everything you just said is also true about water.
      - forgetfreeman 3y ago
        It's also true of lead. Care to eat a brick of it and report your findings?
        mattmaroon 3y ago
        All of your logic on this topic is leaving out the fact that our world is powered by a lot of chemicals, and without them, a lot of people would be dead. There’s a reason the population has grown so much in the last two centuries. We’ve gotten really good at making food, housing, and other things that keep people alive, and those all involve chemicals that have not gone through double blind randomized controlled trials and, in fact, have severe negative health outcomes if a human is exposed to too much of them. It is not exaggeration to say that of the worlds 8 billion people, at least half of them would not be here without fertilizers and pesticides. Those are things that have, at times, caused environmental issues that harm people also. If we were to take off of the market overnight every chemical that was not proven to have no possible negative effect, we would lose billions of people. Literally. The reason we are phasing out PFAs rather than simply immediately prohibiting them is that they are useful in a lot of applications that are important and we need time to replace them, and barring certain egregious incidents like 3M dumping a bunch of it in the river, there just is no known harm. So we fine them quite a lot for the egregious incidents. Good. This is the problem with the socialist mind virus, they act like everything has no upside so you can just prohibit whatever you don’t like and the world will be better off for it. That’s why you think counter-arguments are just pedantry. They aren’t, it’s just that you’re thinking about it is not in depth.
speedylight 3y ago
That’s exactly why it’s bad, we don’t require businesses to prove X chemical/compound is safe before we start using it for whatever, no, we use it and just hope that it’s safe.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  The problem is, there are very many chemicals, those chemicals in many ways power our modern world, and they can all end up in drinking water or ingested by some other means. If you took every chemical off of the market that didn’t go through a randomized controlled double blind study, billions of people would die. Literally. How many people are fed thanks to fertilizers and pesticides that we know would be actively harmful if you consume them in quantity? Or at least don’t know would be unharmful. It’s not practical to ban everything that we don’t know can be ingested safely. It’s just not even an intelligent idea. It’s merely a response to hysteria.
  - esafak 3y ago
    These chemicals were suspected to be harmful but allowed to be used anyway. This is not an innocent mistake. Same playbook as the tobacco industry. Throw the book at them, they deserve it. https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-pfos/ https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p...
  - speedylight 3y ago
    I am not suggesting that we ban all chemicals not properly studied, but we can do a lot to at least get a sense of what X chemical may be capable of doing to us if ingested. I don’t think it would’ve been incredibly difficult or burdensome to think that a chemical that can with stand 900+ degrees celsius won’t be metabolized and broken down very well inside the body, the next obvious supposition would be well is the body going to be able to eliminate it in some way or will it just stay there? What happens if it stays there, that doesn’t sound very good? These are all basic questions 3M chemists could’ve asked themselves before they created this mess, or may be they did and no one paid attention.
mikeiz404 3y ago
> There is not strong evidence that the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to cause any health issues at all. It is, of course, concerning. Nobody likes the idea of materials building up in their bodies. I mean the research is still relatively new and ongoing [1][4] where “most of the hundreds of PFAS currently in commerce have limited or no toxicity data” [5]. And in 2022 the EPA posted “…updated advisory levels, which are based on new science and consider lifetime exposure, indicate that some negative health effects may occur with concentrations of PFOA or PFOS in water that are near zero.” [2]. On top of that there are lots of PFAs which cannot be individually tested for — In 2019 the EPA “can now measure 29 chemicals”[6] out of “thousands of PFAS chemicals” [7] — which means many of those tests are only checking for a small subset of this class of chemical (though the older and more widely used ones have been prioritized for testing). Also where do you get your control group from for low level exposure? It takes time to bioaccumulate and most people are already exposed to some degree —“Nearly all people in the United States have measurable amounts of PFAS in their blood” [4] — through many different sources — “There are thousands of PFAS chemicals, and they are found in many different consumer, commercial, and industrial products. This makes it challenging to study and assess the potential human health and environmental risks.” [7]. Some other interesting links/articles: - https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/ https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/ - https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/i-tested-my-blood-tap-water-household-products-and-cat-for-pfas-toxic-forever-chemicals-a8299795055/ https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/i... - https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-antarctica-and-on-the-tibetan-plateau-rainwater-is-unsafe-to-drink-1.620735 https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-ant... - https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-beautiful-parkersburg/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b... - https://cen.acs.org/environment/persistent-pollutants/US-EPA-sets-health-advisory-6-PFAS/100/i22 https://cen.acs.org/environment/persistent-pollutants/US-EPA... - https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-announces-voluntary-agreement-manufacturers-phase-out-certain-short-chain-pfas-used-food https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-anno... Sources: 1: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html 2: https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pfoa-and-pfos https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pf... 4: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/resources/pfas-information-for-clinicians.html https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/resources/pfas-information-fo... 5: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/national-pfas-testing-strategy https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t... 6: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-new-method-test-additional-pfas-drinking-water https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-new-method-te... 7: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-explained https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-explained
mikeiz404 3y ago
> But we can't say they knew they were hurting many people, because we still don't. I’d highly recommend reading this article. It’s quite long but worth the read. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-beautiful-parkersburg/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...

akaru 3y ago

Yet a drug—that people willingly and optionally take as opposed to this—must be proven NOT to create harm before it is allowed in the wild. Your argument sounds like it is in bad faith.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> must be proven NOT to create harm before it is allowed in the wild This isn’t how we regulate chemicals in America. Perhaps it should be.
- hyperdimension 3y ago
  I think that that was the implication. We should elevate the standard for new chemicals that might enter our body through the environment to a similar standard we already have for drugs (chemicals we deliberately put into our body.)
- rayiner 3y ago
  To my knowledge, that’s not how we regulate industrial chemicals anywhere. I agree it probably should be. Those chemists are witch doctors.
- lazide 3y ago
  I’m not sure how that is even possible, frankly. What sort of test suite would THAT look like?
mattmaroon 3y ago
You are conflating very different things. Go into any Whole Foods and there is an entire aisle of pills that are not proven to not create harm, in fact, some of them most certainly do. Pharmaceuticals play by a different set of rules than other chemicals because humans are particularly gullible when it comes to health claims. "Snake oil salesman" is a common term for a reason. We don't let big pharma make certain claims without ample test data for a whole host of obvious reasons. In this context we were talking about punishing people for "harming" without having proven that they've really harmed at all. This would be more like locking up all the Chinese restaurant owners for using MSG. Your argument sounds like it is in bad logic.
- zug_zug 3y ago
  That really feels like a bad-faith and misinformed comparison. Can you please at least do a very basic amount of research before you take sides on this? Perhaps watch a documentary (e.g. the devil we know) or read at least 1 wikipedia article -- it was clear from the outset that workers at these factories were giving birth to children with birth-defects for example. [1] These companies had engineers who were actively concerned about its health effects, circulating internal memos to that effect [1], but just because there wasn't a finalized published study are able to claim "well.... it's not proooooven technically for 100% sure to be bad for you in small doses..." Of course small doses of anything can take a decade to be proven harmful to newborn children. These are now being linked to ADHD, that's something that takes years of very intentional research to find (because how old does a kid have to be to get that diagnosis). https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/05/425451/makers-pfas-forever-chemicals-covered-dangers https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/05/425451/makers-pfas-forever...
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    Documentaries are not research. I have read countless actual papers on this. You can find them online. I am not taking the side you think I am, you simply are reading things into what I said that aren’t there. I am sure 3M did awful things. I am sure high levels of the stuff are dangerous, certain occupations were exposed to it at dangerous levels, the company willingly ignored that. I’m sure they deserve this fine. Fines of this magnitude hit corporations where they live in the way that jailing a COO cannot. I just think “mass harm” is not proven. Perhaps some simply define that differently than I do, I don’t consider the relatively tiny amounts of factory workers impacted to be mass harm. Awful, sure. But the hysteria about this, and what I think most people are talking about when they use that term, is the level all of us are exposed to via drinking water, food packaging, etc. There’s simply no proof (or even solid evidence) of mass harm by that definition, just hysteria. Proof may arrive one day, I do not know. As you point out, it may take years or even decades. (Though it has been around nearly a century, and in large quantities for some time.) The word “linked” is always common in bunk science. When you see that frequently on any topic, you can be sure there’s hysteria. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect every chemical manufactured (they all can end up in water systems) to be clinically tested. Those chemicals are too important to modern life to yank them all. There are too many.
rayiner 3y ago
Every single western society takes a different approach to drugs that people directly ingest and industrial chemicals that might build up in peoples’ bodies. The calculus seems to be that people would rather have better non-stick pans and are okay with a few more people dying from them. You might disagree with that, but OP is just stating what’s apparently common sense. That’s the exact opposite of “bad faith.”
- lazide 3y ago
  Well, people buy non stick pans despite there being evidence people may die from it, so I’d say the evidence is strongly in your favor.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    My girlfriend is simultaneously outraged that there are PFAs in the water supply and has entire sets of pans that are disintegrating Teflon that she even puts in the dishwasher. When I point out the irony she shrugs.
    - lazide 3y ago
      A good description of the current state of society if I’ve ever heard one.
lazide 3y ago
That is definitely not the bar for drugs, or most drugs would not be allowed to be sold. The FDA requires that drugs provably and consistently have an effect, and that side effects are generally well known and not excessively bad so as to outweigh the benefits. Drugs without known side effects are the worst in the eyes of the FDA (except those with no redeeming properties whatsoever anyway), because it doesn’t allow for manageable prescribing. If they were proven to be safe, they wouldn’t require a prescription and would be sold over the counter. Though even that bar isn’t really required, or St. John’s Wort, Tylenol, etc. wouldn’t be allowed to be sold.

cpncrunch 3y ago

Most of the comments here are highly disturbing, bring out the pitchforks. Its sad that this is on HN.

mattmaroon 3y ago
Most people don’t know the difference between a Netflix documentary and research.
- rayiner 3y ago
  [flagged]

forgetfreeman 3y ago

Absolute nonsense. We've known since at least the 90s that this shit posed significant health risks. See Also: Parkersburg, West Virginia.

mattmaroon 3y ago
We can be reasonably certain that very high exposure is harmful, yes. Only a small percent of the population achieved that level of exposure, thankfully.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  Things we know: high concentrations are catastrophically harmful, it persists in the environment indefinitely, and this shit is bio accumulative. That should be the end of any discussion about product safety.
  - fingerlocks 3y ago
    Everything you just said is also true about water.
    - forgetfreeman 3y ago
      It's also true of lead. Care to eat a brick of it and report your findings?
      - mattmaroon 3y ago
        All of your logic on this topic is leaving out the fact that our world is powered by a lot of chemicals, and without them, a lot of people would be dead. There’s a reason the population has grown so much in the last two centuries. We’ve gotten really good at making food, housing, and other things that keep people alive, and those all involve chemicals that have not gone through double blind randomized controlled trials and, in fact, have severe negative health outcomes if a human is exposed to too much of them. It is not exaggeration to say that of the worlds 8 billion people, at least half of them would not be here without fertilizers and pesticides. Those are things that have, at times, caused environmental issues that harm people also. If we were to take off of the market overnight every chemical that was not proven to have no possible negative effect, we would lose billions of people. Literally. The reason we are phasing out PFAs rather than simply immediately prohibiting them is that they are useful in a lot of applications that are important and we need time to replace them, and barring certain egregious incidents like 3M dumping a bunch of it in the river, there just is no known harm. So we fine them quite a lot for the egregious incidents. Good. This is the problem with the socialist mind virus, they act like everything has no upside so you can just prohibit whatever you don’t like and the world will be better off for it. That’s why you think counter-arguments are just pedantry. They aren’t, it’s just that you’re thinking about it is not in depth.

speedylight 3y ago

That’s exactly why it’s bad, we don’t require businesses to prove X chemical/compound is safe before we start using it for whatever, no, we use it and just hope that it’s safe.

mattmaroon 3y ago
The problem is, there are very many chemicals, those chemicals in many ways power our modern world, and they can all end up in drinking water or ingested by some other means. If you took every chemical off of the market that didn’t go through a randomized controlled double blind study, billions of people would die. Literally. How many people are fed thanks to fertilizers and pesticides that we know would be actively harmful if you consume them in quantity? Or at least don’t know would be unharmful. It’s not practical to ban everything that we don’t know can be ingested safely. It’s just not even an intelligent idea. It’s merely a response to hysteria.
- esafak 3y ago
  These chemicals were suspected to be harmful but allowed to be used anyway. This is not an innocent mistake. Same playbook as the tobacco industry. Throw the book at them, they deserve it. https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-pfos/ https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p...
- speedylight 3y ago
  I am not suggesting that we ban all chemicals not properly studied, but we can do a lot to at least get a sense of what X chemical may be capable of doing to us if ingested. I don’t think it would’ve been incredibly difficult or burdensome to think that a chemical that can with stand 900+ degrees celsius won’t be metabolized and broken down very well inside the body, the next obvious supposition would be well is the body going to be able to eliminate it in some way or will it just stay there? What happens if it stays there, that doesn’t sound very good? These are all basic questions 3M chemists could’ve asked themselves before they created this mess, or may be they did and no one paid attention.

mikeiz404 3y ago

> There is not strong evidence that the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to cause any health issues at all. It is, of course, concerning. Nobody likes the idea of materials building up in their bodies. I mean the research is still relatively new and ongoing [1][4] where “most of the hundreds of PFAS currently in commerce have limited or no toxicity data” [5]. And in 2022 the EPA posted “…updated advisory levels, which are based on new science and consider lifetime exposure, indicate that some negative health effects may occur with concentrations of PFOA or PFOS in water that are near zero.” [2]. On top of that there are lots of PFAs which cannot be individually tested for — In 2019 the EPA “can now measure 29 chemicals”[6] out of “thousands of PFAS chemicals” [7] — which means many of those tests are only checking for a small subset of this class of chemical (though the older and more widely used ones have been prioritized for testing). Also where do you get your control group from for low level exposure? It takes time to bioaccumulate and most people are already exposed to some degree —“Nearly all people in the United States have measurable amounts of PFAS in their blood” [4] — through many different sources — “There are thousands of PFAS chemicals, and they are found in many different consumer, commercial, and industrial products. This makes it challenging to study and assess the potential human health and environmental risks.” [7]. Some other interesting links/articles: - https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/ https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/ - https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/i-tested-my-blood-tap-water-household-products-and-cat-for-pfas-toxic-forever-chemicals-a8299795055/ https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/i... - https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-antarctica-and-on-the-tibetan-plateau-rainwater-is-unsafe-to-drink-1.620735 https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-ant... - https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-beautiful-parkersburg/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b... - https://cen.acs.org/environment/persistent-pollutants/US-EPA-sets-health-advisory-6-PFAS/100/i22 https://cen.acs.org/environment/persistent-pollutants/US-EPA... - https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-announces-voluntary-agreement-manufacturers-phase-out-certain-short-chain-pfas-used-food https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-anno... Sources: 1: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html 2: https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pfoa-and-pfos https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pf... 4: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/resources/pfas-information-for-clinicians.html https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/resources/pfas-information-fo... 5: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/national-pfas-testing-strategy https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t... 6: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-new-method-test-additional-pfas-drinking-water https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-new-method-te... 7: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-explained https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-explained

mikeiz404 3y ago

> But we can't say they knew they were hurting many people, because we still don't. I’d highly recommend reading this article. It’s quite long but worth the read. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-beautiful-parkersburg/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...