the industry has been hiding health risks for decades

Like tobacco and sugar, even in the field of production of perfluoroalkyl substances, the infamous Pfas, there has been repeated fraudulent behavior by the manufacturing companies. Which, like those who sold cigarettes and sugary drinks, willing to do anything to continue to increase sales, have consolidated habits that would have been difficult to break and have continued to keep very worrying data hidden, denying at the same time that those 15,000 substances , consider perennials, could pose a risk to human health.

But, as happened for the other two areas, the moment of truth has also arrived for the Pfas, after years of heated controversies, lawsuits, books and even films that all went in the same, unequivocal direction: that of harmful effects that are increasingly difficult to hide and deny . Researchers at the University of California in San Francisco have in fact just announced, on the Annals of Global Health, an analysis of documents remained secret, almost always internal and confidential, of two of the main manufacturers of Pfas, the giants DuPont and 3M, covering the period from 1961 to 2006, donated to the university by one of the fundamental protagonists of all the story, the lawyer Robert Bilott, the first to file a lawsuit against the chemical giants and to win it. Bilott, on whose story the film was also made Bad watersgave all the collected documentation to the producers of a documentary, who in turn donated it to the experts, to be thoroughly analyzed, and the result is a report with the explicit title: The Devil They Knew: Analysis of the Chemical Record on the Influence of Industry on Pfas Science. The study demonstrates very clearly how the two companies were in possession of both epidemiological data, on employees employed in the lines dedicated to the production of Pfas, and results obtained internally on animal models, the conclusions of which were very clear.

Among the many elements that emerged, here are some:

• Already in 1961 the manager of the toxicology sector of DuPont pointed out that Teflon made the liver of animal models swell at low doses and invited to handle the substance with extreme caution, absolutely avoiding any contact with the skin;
• In 1970, a report commissioned by DuPont from an outside laboratory concluded that C8, one of the most widely used PFASs, was toxic when inhaled or ingested in very low doses, and in another, from 1979, the same laboratory stated that some dogs died within two days after ingesting a single dose of another of the most common Pfas, Pfoa;
• In 1980, DuPont and 3M had learned that two of the eight pregnant employees working at C8 had given birth to children with malformations, but they had not told anyone, including women, nor made any suggestions of a link; on the contrary, a few months later they declared that there was no evidence of the danger of C8 for the fetus. According to DuPont, C8 was as stable and safe as table salt, while in the face of environmental contamination, in 1991, the company still maintained that there was no danger at the doses detected.

Shortly afterfollowing a series of lawsuits filed between 1998 and 2002, DuPont itself had urged the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to declare Teflon safe (within 24 hours), because Pfoa (perfluoro- octanoic) that it contained was a safe substance and it was necessary to dispel any fear from consumers.

Then, in 2004, the first setback: the EPA had sentenced DuPont to a 16.4 million dollar fine for not disclosing data on the dangers of Pfoa: trifles, if one considers that that year the company had earned a billion dollars from the Pfas. But something changed at that moment (and since then other causes have been lost), to the point that today many countries are wondering how to set limits on the use of Pfas and how to try to eliminate them from the environment.

The EPA, for its part, it seems to be an exception: its leaders, all appointed by Donald Trump and known to be, like the former president, much more interested in business than in the health of citizens, have just taken a decision that brings the agency back of decades. As reported by the Guardian, which has been following the Pfas affair for years with investigations and reports, the agency is allowing the company Inhance Technologies to continue producing plastic containers – especially for food – full of Pfas, which followed in the footsteps of DuPont and 3M by lying repeatedly and is still involved in numerous lawsuits and class actions. Inhance produces about 200 million pieces a year and, according to various environmental and consumer associations, it does so by treating the plastics with a vaporization of fluorine derivatives which generates at least nine different Pfas over time, directly in the plastic, releasing them into the content: for For example, very high concentrations have been found in containers for pesticides and are generally found in plastic bottles, to the point that the EPA itself has requested more controlled procedures. In 2022 Inhance declared that it had modified the process to have plastics that release a negligible amount of Pfas, promptly denied by a study by the University of Notre Dame. But the agency seems to have no difficulty in allowing the same company to continue producing plastics that release Pfas.

In the meantime, while the list of widely used products in which very high concentrations of Pfas are found increases (among the latest: daily contact lenses and sanitary towels), the studies that associate them with negative effects on health are also growing, such as that on female fertility .

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June 13, 2023