#pfos

What do firefighting foam, non-stick cookware, water-repellent textiles and pesticides all have in common? They all contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS—human-made chemicals that don't break down naturally. It's no wonder, then, that PFAS are now contaminating soil and water and can also be detected in the bodies of humans and animals. The dangers are well known: these forever chemicals can damage the liver, trigger hormonal disorders and cause cancer, to mention just a few of their effects. Researchers in the group under Salvador Pané i Vidal, Professor at ETH Zurich's Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, have developed a new method to break down a subgroup of PFAS called perfluorooctane sulfonates, or PFOS. Due to their toxicity, PFOS are now severely restricted or even banned. The study is published in the journal Small Science.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The Biden administration is designating two “forever chemicals,” man-made compounds that are linked to serious health risks, as hazardous substances under the Superfund law, shifting responsibility for their cleanup to polluters from taxpayers.

The new rule announced on Friday empowers the government to force the many companies that manufacture or use perfluorooctanoic acid, also known as PFOA, and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, known as PFOS, to monitor any releases into the environment and be responsible for cleaning them up. Those companies could face billions of dollars in liabilities.

The pair of compounds are part of a larger family of chemical substances known collectively as PFAS.

The compounds, found in everything from dental floss to firefighting foams to children’s toys, are called forever chemicals because they degrade very slowly and can accumulate in the body and the environment. Exposure to PFAS has been associated with metabolic disorders, decreased fertility in women, developmental delays in children and increased risk of some prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The chemicals are so ubiquitous that they can be detected in the blood of almost every person in the United States. One recent government study discovered PFAS chemicals in nearly half of the nation’s tap water. In 2022, the E.P.A. found the chemicals could cause harm at levels “much lower than previously understood” and that almost no level of exposure was safe.

For years, health issues, like heart attacks, respiratory problems, and decreased lung function, have been linked to air pollution.

Now, new research has added another disease to the laundry list of health issues that may be caused by dirty air: dementia.

What happened?

CBS News reported that new estimates from researchers published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine showed that annually nearly 188,000 dementia cases in the U.S. may have been caused by air pollution.

The study, one of the latest to spotlight health risks from air pollution, looked at how specific causes of air pollution seem to be more strongly tied to dementia than others.

It indicated exposure to pollution from wildfires and agriculture as having the strongest links to increasing a person’s risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia later in life.

Research findings were based on survey data that spanned decades and is backed by the National Institutes of Health. The data was then combined with air quality modeling, according to CBS.

“They model all sources at once: coal-fired power plants, agriculture, wildfires, traffic — all these different emission sources — and then they turn off the source in the model one at a time. And then they can see the difference in what levels are there with the emissions sources and what are there without them,” Sara Adar, associate chair of epidemiology at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, told CBS News.

Researchers focused on particulate matter with diameters that are generally 2.5 micrometers and smaller in air pollution that is breathable and found that direct emissions aren’t the only concern.

In addition to the smoke directly from wildfires, other toxic molecules travel with the smoke as fires burn through communities. Farming was also found to worsen serious air pollution.

“Farms will release a lot of ammonia gas,” Adar said, “and then in the air with the sunlight and other pollutants out there, they’ll react to make particles, and those particles are what we see are likely toxins for the brain.”

Why are these findings concerning?

With wildfires and agriculture being the leading causes, if we don’t change our habits, we will likely see even more cases of dementia apparently caused by air pollution.

Agriculture is another significant contributor to air pollution, with livestock accounting for 14.5% of human-made planet-heating pollution, according to the United Nations. Overall, agriculture makes up over 11% of this type of pollution, per the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.

Further, extreme temperatures and less rainfall — both becoming increasingly common, at least in some places, as our planet heats up — make for longer and worse fire seasons, meaning air pollution from wildfires will only worsen as well.

What can I do to help?

To protect ourselves and others from this risk, we must all work to reduce the amount of pollution released into the air.

“Unlike many other common risk factors for dementia (e.g., hypertension, stroke, and diabetes),” the study’s authors wrote, “exposures to air pollution can be modified at the population level, making it a prime target for large-scale prevention efforts.”

16June2022

(CNN) -- The US Environmental Protection Agency issued health advisories Wednesday for common "forever chemicals" that are found in hundreds of household items and pollute drinking water systems across the country. 

The update is based on the most recent science, which suggest that these chemicals are much more hazardous to human health than scientists had thought and are probably more dangerous at levels thousands of times lower than previously believed.

This PFAS family of synthetic chemicals remains in the environment and in the human body for a long time, as the "forever" name implies.

There are hundreds of chemicals in the family, but some of the best-known are PFOS and PFOA.

Science has found that exposure to PFAS can lead to serious health problems. Exposure is linked with liver damage, thyroid disease, diabetes, decreased fertility, kidney problems, high cholesterol, obesity, hormone suppression and cancer.

Starting in the 1940s, manufacturers widely adopted the use of PFAS because they are good at repelling oil and water. Their signature elemental bonds of fluorine and carbon are extremely strong, making it difficult for the chemicals to break down in the environment or in our bodies.

The chemicals can be found in Teflon nonstick products; water repellants on carpets, furniture and clothes; and paints, cleaning products, cosmetics, food packaging and firefighting foams.

Over the past decade, chemical manufacturers have voluntarily stopped producing PFOS and PFOA. At the federal level, the US Food and Drug Administration phased out the use of certain PFAS chemicals in 2016. The FDA and manufacturers agreed in 2020 to phase out some PFAS chemicals from food packaging and other items that came into contact with food. However, FDA monitoring of the environment showed that the chemicals tend to linger.

Testing by the nonprofit Toxic-Free Future found that 74% of imported products still contain older PFAS chemicals.

These chemicals can easily migrate into air, dust, food, soil and water. People can also be exposed to them through food packaging and industrial work.

PFAS has also been found in high concentrations at the country's military bases. The US Department of Defense says it has spent more than $1.5 billion on PFAS-related research and cleanup efforts. 

In the body, the chemicals primarily settle into the blood, kidney and liver. A 2007 study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that PFAS chemicals could be detected in 98% of the US population.

In 2016, the EPA recommended PFAS concentrations in drinking water of no more than 70 parts per trillion (ppt). The interim advisories updated Wednesday recommend no more than 0.0004 ppt of PFOA and 0.02 ppt of PFOS, so low that the chemicals cannot be reliably detected.

Also Wednesday, for the first time, the EPA issued final advisories for limits in drinking water of the PFAS chemicals GenX, considered a replacement for PFOA, and PFBS, a replacement for PFOS. It now advises less than 10 ppt for GenX and 2,000 ppt for PFBS. 

"Today's actions highlight EPA's commitment to use the best available science to tackle PFAS pollution, protect public health, and provide critical information quickly and transparently," EPA Assistant Administrator for Water Radhika Fox said in a statement. 

The advisories are not enforceable, but they could have an effect on drinking water rules and monitoring programs at the state and federal level. There are also thousands of lawsuits making their way through the courts against companies that used these chemicals. 

The EPA said it is making available the first $1 billion of $5 billion in grant funding from President Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to help communities reduce PFAS in drinking water.

The American Chemistry Council, a group that represents the chemical industry, said Wednesday that the EPA failed to follow "its accepted practice for ensuring the scientific integrity of its process." In a statement, the association argued that the EPA should have waited for a peer review of the science to introduce these changes.