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Comment by hereme888 | Hacker News Reader

Sheesh, I can't believe the percent of negative comments! Someone finally figured a way to reduce PFAS. It's a hugely positive finding, especially in light of people being able to keep their red blood cells. Hopefully it can be ruled as a safe long-term solution for now. Looking forward to reading updates on this research.

And btw, donating plasma doesn't mean other people will get your PFAS; many things can be done with plasma besides injecting into other people.

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Even if someone else would get your PFAS its most likely they have them as well and its certainly better than dying of blood loss or not treating other serious issues that rely on various blood products.

Absolutely, the point of a blood transfusion is that a body needs blood replenished faster than it can produce it. A blood transfusion now, PFAS or no, gives someone a chance to survive (and who knows, maybe donate blood themselves at some point)

Anyway it's a problem you can fix yourself by donating more blood than you receive.

There are diseases where you get regular transfusions. For these patients, PFAS would become a problem since they are, by definition, not subject to degradation. Unless, of course, the patients are physically losing blood.

Which makes me wonder if women have a specific advantage on this matter. I do remember reading that regular blood donations show health benefits, and that women get them "for free", so to speak. This may be part of the reason.

Our recent cavemen ancestors probably got injured and bled a bit much more often than we do.

It's not hard to imagine the human body optimizing for those conditions, which would make permanently holding onto all your blood suboptimal.

Yes, women do have an advantage. Hemachromatosis occurs in men much more frequently. Of course, they suffer from iron deficiency much more often...

I haven't heard of PFAS before but the findings kind of sounds straightforward? If something that can be synthesised by the body gets contaminated by external pollutants, it should get purer by removing part of the contaminated material since it's going to be replaced by newly synthesised supplies and result in dilution of the pollutant.

In other words, dilution is solution of pollution[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvnllquGmgg

PFAS is teflon. If you ever cooked w/ teflon pans you probably ingested some PFAS directly from that. It's called 'forever chemicals' because it doesn't degrade, it's literally there forever (or nearly), very hard to get rid of.

There's a really good documentary called Dark Waters about a lawyer for the Chemical industry who switches sides after his home town has a lot of people get sick from Dupont poisoining people and he's been fighting a crusade against them ever since. It stars Anne Hathaway and Mark Ruffalo.

In the future going for regular blood filtering will be like going to the dentist.

Regular plasma donation is probably much worse for your long term health than ppb levels of pfas.

Citation?

Regular is an extremely vague term here, what are you talking about? a few times a year or weekly? Like the other person said, citations needed.

Does your body not just make more like blood?

> Regular plasma donation is probably much worse for your long term health than ppb levels of pfas.

You should in the very least read the summary. Even though the trial referred in the submission tracked regular plasma donations, the reduction of "forever chemicals" was not a function of how regular they were, only the volume of blood/plasma donated by the firefighters.

Also, I'd be surprised if the rate wasn't tied to the initial concentration, which would mean that increased rates lead to diminished returns.

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