Toxic Substances Portal - Perfluoroalkyls | Hacker News Reader

Toxic Substances Portal - Perfluoroalkyls

atsdr.cdc.gov

61 pointsdevhead22 comments

One story about how PFOAs screwed up a town in WV, and how DuPont tried to cover it up:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...

Phenomenal read. Really terrifying that people in authority within DuPont are comfortable poisoning so many people in the name of profits. At some point you'd expect guilt/decency to kick in, but apparently not.

I'm genuinely surprised that this would be something that raises an eyebrow for someone. Chemical companies all have extremely spotty histories (I suggest reading about benzine and the auto industry).

Tobacco, oil, and Coca-Cola execs learned their products were dangerous and chose to bury the research. They even funded biased studies to conclude the opposite.

Those are all on the scale of billions of victims, and in the case of oil, the potential for harm includes most life on Earth.

I suppose this is true. I tend to think of the known scandals as one-off abnormalities, rather than a common occurrence. Perhaps this is naive, or perhaps when you're at this scale, even if 99% of what you do is safe and honest, that 1% can do massive damage.

  billions of victims

Within the scope of tobacco and soda pop/soft drinks (since coca-cola isn't the only actor, even if they are a stand-out case, if not THE singular stand-out example) the victims aren't victimized in a visceral sense, in that people have options in front of them, and they make their choices.

It's a really long, slow process of injury, with plenty of time to change course, and no one is intimidated or forcibly coerced to behave as they do. So it comes down to broad conventional, normalized availability and scales of supply that outpaces natural demand, coupled with deceptive propaganda and misinformation. But the victimization is soft, subtle and really only harmful over decades or generationally. Compared to the daily realities faced, throughout the twentieth century, it's silly to bat an eye at these things.

Suffice to say, alcohol is so much worse than either, short-term and long-term. And look at what came of prohibition.

Fossile fuels, on the other hand, and petrochemicals in particular, encompass a misery inducing nightmare so complete, and have enabled pretty much every modern horror experienced, to the point that it begs disbelief. The word "victims" barely scratches the surface, and number "billions" would be shocking if it weren't numbing and obvious at a conceptual level.

At some point you'd expect guilt/decency to kick in, but apparently not.

It comes from Machiavelli, which is canon in both business and politics.

I want to know more about the family that used it in the dishwasher and to wash their car. Why?

It probably helped their plates or car stay a little bit shinier for a little bit longer.

In general, the attractive properties of fluorinated hydrocarbons is also what makes them nasty. C-F bonds are incredibly stable, so they stick around forever. So, fluorination imparts a practical toxic liability to compounds that otherwise are too short-lived to be "toxic" in the "real world."

In addition, any process energetic enough to break C-F bonds will generate incredibly reactive intermediates which then attach to whatever biology is nearby.

The same "nastiness" makes these compounds essentially non-toxic, too. Since nothing less reactive than oxygen radicals seems to attack C-F bonds, these compounds just sit there doing nothing. Which is what the report's summary says: they found the more common compounds everywhere, but they just sit there. (The summary(!) has awfully low information density, I am not going to look at the full report.)

> Perfluoroalkyls have been released to air, water, and soil in and around fluorochemical facilities located within the United States (3M 2007b, 2008a, 2008b; Barton et al. 2007; Davis et al. 2007; DuPont 2008; EPA 2008a).

> Since the early 2000s, companies in the fluorochemical industry have been working in concert with the EPA to phase out the production and use of long-chain perfluoroalkyl compounds and their precursors.

> ..have been phased out by the eight corporations in the perfluorotelomer/fluorotelomer industry (Arkema, Asahi, BASF [successor to Ciba], Clariant, Daikin, 3M/Dyneon, DuPont, and Solvay Solexis) as part of the EPA’s PFOA Stewardship Program (DuPont 2008; EPA 2008a, 2016a). Industrial releases of these compounds in the United States have declined or been totally eliminated based on company reports submitted to EPA.

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp200-c5.pdf

> The EPA has set drinking water levels for PFOA and PFOS of 70 parts per trillion.

Per trillion? Seems like pretty nasty stuff.

By LD50, it's 1/10th as toxic as Vitamin D, which is to say you'd need 10× as much PFOS to kill you as Vitamin D.

Part per trillion isn't particularly impressive for drinking water standards. There is one chemical where the standard is 30 parts per quadrillion.

Acute lethality is not the problem. The problem is the developmental effects on children, the cancer risk, immune system risks and liver damage risks:

https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/supporti...

Also:

https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/drinking...

So you're saying that some substances are more dangerous than others, by volume.

Actually, by weight, not by volume.

Sounds like they set it just above the detection level, "just to be careful".

Excerpt:

A major environmental health study that had been suppressed by the Trump administration because of the “public relations nightmare” it might cause the Pentagon and other polluters has been quietly released online.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published the controversial 852-page review of health dangers from a family of chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — manmade chemicals used in everything from carpets and frying pan coatings to military firefighting foams — on its website this morning, and will publish a notice in the Federal Register tomorrow.

The study upends federally accepted notions for how much of these chemicals are safe for people — recommending an exposure limit for one of the compounds that is 10 times lower than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has maintained is the safe threshold, and seven times lower for another compound. The stricter exposure thresholds are similar to those established by state health agencies in New Jersey and Michigan. All told, the report offers the most comprehensive gathering of information on the effects of these chemicals today, and suggests they’re far more dangerous than previously thought.

Source: (ProPublica) https://www.propublica.org/article/suppressed-study-the-epa-...

> Delayed report on toxic water contamination report released

This subject is vague and incorrect. This is specifically about PFAs in the environment, not just "toxic water contamination."

Is this new info? I thought PFAs were widely understood.

It also is redundant. Either the "report on" near the front or the "report" near the back should be deleted...unless it is actually intended to mean that there are two reports, one on toxic water contamination and another report about the first report.

Hopefully this gets mirrored worldwide, and that fast, before the Trump administration can order its takedown. Would that actually be possible/legal?

Trump could get it taken down off the .gov site. It's possible, and it's probably legal (but IANAL).

Trump could not get it removed from the net. It's gone. If you viewed it, you probably have a cached copy on your hard drive. So do several hundred other people.

If Trump tries to shut this report down, it will go viral (see "Streisand Effect").

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