4 ms·

PFOA/PFOS propaganda is wild. They're very useful substances. Yes, acute exposures cause harm, but the same can be said of salt. Though with modern instrumen

PFOA/PFOS propaganda is wild. They're very useful substances. Yes, acute exposures cause harm, but the same can be said of salt. Though with modern instrumentation we can measure presence in parts per trillion, I have seen no evidence at all that likely bioaccumulative pathways have resulted in harm to humans. Even the opening of this article levers "we found it" with "EPA regulates it in drinking water" as self-evident that it's some kind of super poison. But it's not. Frankly, it's not always even clear what "it" is as there are thousands of different compounds, many of which people consume daily (e.g., flonase, prozac, etc). The health alarm around these substances is just astounding to me.

e40 2y ago
Then please point out the studies that show they are safe for the human body.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  That's not how it works.
- toolz 2y ago
  I would enjoy seeing the studies that show they are harmful in the doses that humans are exposed to as well, I don't know much of anything about this subject.
  - vitalredundancy 2y ago
    the studies are described in the article > What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies — two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late ’70s, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about 10 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low — roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet. the only propaganda about PFOS was made by 3M, telling us these chemicals were safe, when they knew they weren't.
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      Like countless substances both natural and synthetic, they appear safe enough if you don't eat a substantial amount of them. How do the quantities involved in the studies compare to the levels we end up consuming? Nobody ever seems to address that.
      - vitalredundancy 2y ago
        since these chemicals accumulate in the body, if we're absorbing them from the environment they could reach toxic levels. but what if we don't measure toxicity just by death, but by worsening health? if i or my child has some mysterious ailment, how do we know it's not from PFOS chemicals, or many of the other synthetic chemicals industries have been pumping into our air, water, and earth for decades? to wit: lead dropped the average iq of the americans since 1940: https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-sh... how do we measure this kind of toxicity, except well after the damage is already done? if we know something is toxic, why don't we stop using it?
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities. Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto. Sometimes that kind of throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified, as in the leaded-gasoline example, while sometimes it's not.
        pessimizer 2y ago
        > Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities. We mostly don't take things in the large-enough quantities to make them poisonous. We cook on teflon for entire lifetimes, scraping food off of it, throwing out the pans when we visibly see the coating coming off. > Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto. No, they don't. But suggestions of regulation or political change somehow always get compared to terrorism.
xbar 2y ago
Your statements do not have the effect you intended. I am now interested in studying the pro-PFOS pollution propaganda and its sources.
calibas 2y ago
Ironic, just about every time I see industry propaganda that defends some toxic chemical, they use two tactics. First, compare it to something else everybody uses and considers harmless. Second, repeat over and over again there's no studies that show it's harmful at very very low doses. You managed to do both.
- Arthur_ODC 2y ago
  They must work for one of these companies. The last 6 months of their post history is a majority of just showing up when an article like this appears and defending PFAS and other types of chemicals or poisons.
  - hcurtiss 2y ago
    I work for a lumber company. We have no connection to, or use of, any of these substances. I just work on toxics issues in different arenas (e.g., air toxics and pesticides).
- mateo1 2y ago
  That's because these are generally valid arguments. The phrase "the dose makes the poison" did not just occur in someone's head for no reason. There's a couple things to note about "forever chemicals": They're around "forever" because they are extremely unreactive. The concentrations the public is concerned about are ridiculous. With such small concentrations, huge timescales for the cause-effect chain to take place and countless confounding factors in between it's basically impossible to make the bold claims the general public makes. That being said: Workers are exposed to much higher concentrations and they should have been protected from it. New chemicals shouldn't be used as widely as they do by simply assuming they're safe. There are uses (like cosmetics etc) were no risk is really warranted so they should be more restricted with what they use. At the end of the day though, when you ban something you need to really understand and take into consideration what kind of damage you'll do to people by banning a substance and all the products that depend on it vs. what kind of damage the substance will do. You can't pretend that you can just ban a whole class of really important compounds without any societal side effects. And that's coming from someone who's really concerned about dangerous chemicals. If you know chemistry, and look around you, you can tell there's a lot more dangerous issues than PFAS that aren't being tackled and nobody seems to care about. Primarily how nobody seems to check what's really included in tons of "cheap" (in terms of manufacturing, not always of price) imported cosmetics, personal hygiene products and parapharmaceuticals. People are buying protein powders and supplements of unknown producers, raw materials and manufacturing methods by the kilos, plastic cooking utensils from the internet and boil/oven bake them with their food, buy sketchy adhesives for their PVC water pipes, and then complain about some 1ppt concentration of inert chemicals in their drinking water. I understand how the public is easily swayed on things that are technical, and I am happy with people being aware of potential dangers, but the focus is really misplaced on something that looks new, scary, unsolvable and interesting instead of tackling the old, boring but important and serious issues we come across every day.
mikestew 2y ago
Yes, acute exposures cause harm, but the same can be said of salt. Experience has taught me that anytime someone pulls the "well, technically, water can poison you in large enough doses" card, an intellectually dishonest conversation is about to follow. This one is no exception: the "well, technically..." card is played, followed by repeated statements of "...ergo, I don't see what the big deal is", and a hefty sprinkling of some whataboutism for seasoning.

e40 2y ago

Then please point out the studies that show they are safe for the human body.

CamperBob2 2y ago
That's not how it works.
toolz 2y ago
I would enjoy seeing the studies that show they are harmful in the doses that humans are exposed to as well, I don't know much of anything about this subject.
- vitalredundancy 2y ago
  the studies are described in the article > What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies — two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late ’70s, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about 10 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low — roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet. the only propaganda about PFOS was made by 3M, telling us these chemicals were safe, when they knew they weren't.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    Like countless substances both natural and synthetic, they appear safe enough if you don't eat a substantial amount of them. How do the quantities involved in the studies compare to the levels we end up consuming? Nobody ever seems to address that.
    - vitalredundancy 2y ago
      since these chemicals accumulate in the body, if we're absorbing them from the environment they could reach toxic levels. but what if we don't measure toxicity just by death, but by worsening health? if i or my child has some mysterious ailment, how do we know it's not from PFOS chemicals, or many of the other synthetic chemicals industries have been pumping into our air, water, and earth for decades? to wit: lead dropped the average iq of the americans since 1940: https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-sh... how do we measure this kind of toxicity, except well after the damage is already done? if we know something is toxic, why don't we stop using it?
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities. Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto. Sometimes that kind of throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified, as in the leaded-gasoline example, while sometimes it's not.
        pessimizer 2y ago
        > Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities. We mostly don't take things in the large-enough quantities to make them poisonous. We cook on teflon for entire lifetimes, scraping food off of it, throwing out the pans when we visibly see the coating coming off. > Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto. No, they don't. But suggestions of regulation or political change somehow always get compared to terrorism.

xbar 2y ago

Your statements do not have the effect you intended. I am now interested in studying the pro-PFOS pollution propaganda and its sources.

calibas 2y ago

Ironic, just about every time I see industry propaganda that defends some toxic chemical, they use two tactics. First, compare it to something else everybody uses and considers harmless. Second, repeat over and over again there's no studies that show it's harmful at very very low doses. You managed to do both.

Arthur_ODC 2y ago
They must work for one of these companies. The last 6 months of their post history is a majority of just showing up when an article like this appears and defending PFAS and other types of chemicals or poisons.
- hcurtiss 2y ago
  I work for a lumber company. We have no connection to, or use of, any of these substances. I just work on toxics issues in different arenas (e.g., air toxics and pesticides).
mateo1 2y ago
That's because these are generally valid arguments. The phrase "the dose makes the poison" did not just occur in someone's head for no reason. There's a couple things to note about "forever chemicals": They're around "forever" because they are extremely unreactive. The concentrations the public is concerned about are ridiculous. With such small concentrations, huge timescales for the cause-effect chain to take place and countless confounding factors in between it's basically impossible to make the bold claims the general public makes. That being said: Workers are exposed to much higher concentrations and they should have been protected from it. New chemicals shouldn't be used as widely as they do by simply assuming they're safe. There are uses (like cosmetics etc) were no risk is really warranted so they should be more restricted with what they use. At the end of the day though, when you ban something you need to really understand and take into consideration what kind of damage you'll do to people by banning a substance and all the products that depend on it vs. what kind of damage the substance will do. You can't pretend that you can just ban a whole class of really important compounds without any societal side effects. And that's coming from someone who's really concerned about dangerous chemicals. If you know chemistry, and look around you, you can tell there's a lot more dangerous issues than PFAS that aren't being tackled and nobody seems to care about. Primarily how nobody seems to check what's really included in tons of "cheap" (in terms of manufacturing, not always of price) imported cosmetics, personal hygiene products and parapharmaceuticals. People are buying protein powders and supplements of unknown producers, raw materials and manufacturing methods by the kilos, plastic cooking utensils from the internet and boil/oven bake them with their food, buy sketchy adhesives for their PVC water pipes, and then complain about some 1ppt concentration of inert chemicals in their drinking water. I understand how the public is easily swayed on things that are technical, and I am happy with people being aware of potential dangers, but the focus is really misplaced on something that looks new, scary, unsolvable and interesting instead of tackling the old, boring but important and serious issues we come across every day.

mikestew 2y ago

Yes, acute exposures cause harm, but the same can be said of salt. Experience has taught me that anytime someone pulls the "well, technically, water can poison you in large enough doses" card, an intellectually dishonest conversation is about to follow. This one is no exception: the "well, technically..." card is played, followed by repeated statements of "...ergo, I don't see what the big deal is", and a hefty sprinkling of some whataboutism for seasoning.