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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

He donates blood or ?

No he takes blood transfusions from his son along with a lot of other questionable procedures and supplements. No one really knows why he developed this problem and it's pretty common but in association with so many exotic medical procedures it's spawned a lot of assumptions about the cause.

Yeah that's what I thought. Which is pretty weird.

Funnily enough donating blood actually can have big benefits for health - they did a study on Firemen who have massively higher PFAS blood levels (exposure to fire fighting foams). Turns out by regularly donating blood it forces the body to make new blood which was the only reliable way to dilute the "forever chemicals".

Is the solution really just to give away the PFAS to blood recipients?

I mean as a solution for high PFAS levels simply drawing blood and throwing it away would also work just fine too. Also the levels in the blood the recipient receives would be diluted by their own blood too unless they were getting a lot of PFAS'd blood often.

Exactly. I believe for the firefighters they were not actually donating it.

For the average person (if we're all contaminated with some small level of pfas) I'm not sure there's a better solution to normal and regular (over many years) blood donation.

There are some side effects with blood transfusions that may be an experiment in itself. For example, blood bags can transfer plasticizers to the blood, which is a method to detect if athletes have been doping.

https://www.wada-ama.org/en/resources/scientific-research/ov...

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