Flame retardants found in consumer products linked to cancer | Hacker News Reader

Flame retardants found in consumer products linked to cancer

cnn.com

27 pointsthelastgallon20 comments

> Two types of PBDEs were voluntarily removed from the US market in 2004. However, the US Environmental Protection Agency did not regulate decabromodiphenyl ether, or DecaBDE, a flame retardant linked to cancer used in textiles, televisions, computers, building and construction materials, and imported articles such as automotive parts, until January 2021.

Great, so you can have an older car without telemetry or a newer one without carcinogens.

> In some cases, the industry has replaced these chemicals with newer phosphorus-based flame retardants, Trasande said, adding that researchers are now concerned these chemicals may be linked to cancer as well.

Of course. So no point in ditching your old car, since the new car will just have upholstery stuffed with a new type of carcinogen.

If you are really wondering whether you should keep your old car or get a new one for health safety reasons, more than the cancer risks you may want to watch a few crash test videos and compare. It’s very visual. You also have all the much better active safety systems.

I'd rather be crippled in a car wreck than succumb to telemetry! The companies running the telemetry can pay my disability in their taxes.

You could also disconnect the modem and never bring the car to the official dealership.

I wonder how one can measure this. Has it been proved that safety systems lead to fewer accidents? Seriously, I'm asking.

Have the number of accidents with fatal outcome decreased? If so, how can it be linked to safety systems? Etc etc So many questions.

Yes, studies seem to indicate so:

https://www.nhtsa.gov/parts-partnership-for-analytics-resear...

https://www.iihs.org/topics/bibliography/ref/2143

Of course the systems are complex and make the car more expensive to repair, but that’s another topic.

Yes, studies have been extensive and based on real world reported accidents.

Newer cars also use more lightweight materials in pursuit of fuel efficiency. My 15 year old Volvo, on the other hand, is quite a bit heavier. That helps if you get hit, but of course makes it more difficult to maneuver out of a tricky situation if the need arises.

If lightweight is the answer, then let's go for motorcycles! :)

Yeah, when the two collide a tank trumps a racecar any day!

The effective date referenced is 2021, so not exactly pre-ABS.

ABS is only one of the active safety systems, and a pretty basic one. I'm not an expert but I want to my local ice track for a safety course this fall and the instructors said that the electronic stability controls improved greatly in the last few years.

There are still a few new vehicles on the market with disable-able telemetry. Now is the time to buy one, before it actually becomes impossible.

Would be nice if annual physicals can include a blood analysis of exposure to these man made chemicals. So far, the list I have in mind is:

- PFAS/PFOA/C8 (“forever chemicals”)

- banned flame retardants (polybrominated diphenyl ethers)

- microplastics

The tests are a bit involved and manual for specificity. E.g. yhe standard product scan for PFxx/C8 just checks for organic fluorine compounds which so happens are a constituent of bones. So you need specific tests for each PFxx compound like LC/MS.

The brominated compounds are a bit easier to detect as bromine is rare and rather bad in general. However again non-specific, and these have shorter lifetime in blood, so unless you're exposed to huge amounts all the time, it will be hard to catch without LC/MS again.

Microplastics are probably funny,.since they require chonky blood sample and repeated fractionation in a centrifuge at the moment. Cheap, but labor intensive at the moment. However automatable.

So any lab (ie, hospital) can run these tests? So a physician can literally ask for anything under the sun, and there really is no technical reason why they cannot.

It might take longer to get the results for more exotic tests (ie, pfas blood serum levels), but for the most part all labs have the equipment to isolate whatever component may be in your blood (foreign or “native”/natural)

Then what can we do? What chemicals can we even find that do not harm us? I hate to be a chemical company shill, but thousands of people used to die in city fires, which we simply at the time took as a fact of life. This absolutely sucks, it's like there really is no way out when it comes to these things.

It really seems that while prevention is great, especially with microplastics being so pervasive now, a cancer cure seems like the only way we as a society can surivive without suffering with relentless cancer diagnoses and deaths which are only rising now. That or we have a degeneration of infrastructure and the economy, which means we'll just go back to dying in tenement fires again.

We see more deaths to cancer because a lot of smokers or former smokers are reaching the late age. Additional issues are general causes of death slowly shifting from cardiovascular to cancer.

One rise in preventable cancers is because some people do not take HPV vaccine anymore. That is mostly breast cancer.

Pancreatic cancer is potentially linked to diet, not exactly to adulterants, but the change is not big.

Testicular cancer and ovarian cancer rates are the probe for PFxx exposure. Again, not a big change... When the vaccination rates are accounted for. Thyroid cancer too, but it's a rare one so noisy data. Breast cancer has the confounder of HPV so you get to look at a subset...

Liver cancer is too non-specific and rates are as usual.

PFxx cancer risk exists, but is very likely tiny lifetime, compared to diet, smoking or lack of exercise. Perhaps even stress but that's hard to track. We're talking RR of edge like 1.05-1.1... unless it's industrial workers and kidney cancer. At most. And results are inconsistent.

Removing these is mostly based on precautionary principle at this point, and the fact it will take forever to fet rid of them. And that they're developmental toxins. As in mess with children.

RFKJR did a podcast on this recently. https://www.podbean.com/ew/dir-v5spc-1de7d667

Gotta stop those flame-retardant vaccines!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com