Perfluorooctanesulfonic and Perfluorooctanoic Acid

Ad from 1975

Huh? You may not be familiar with these complex organic compounds (generically referred to as PFAS chemicals), but undoubtedly you have been using (or have been exposed to) products with these chemicals for years. They’ve been around since the 1970s, manufactured by 3M and later Dupont. Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) were in an incredibly vast array of everyday products, from Teflon-coated non-stick pans to water-repellant clothes. But there’s a catch… actually several nasty catches.

“[They] accumulate in your blood causing cancer, damaging your immune system, injuring your liver, spleen, bone marrow, and increasing cholesterol and triglycerides levels putting you at risk of heart attacks. Fun stuff.

“These fluorochemicals were the basis for the company’s success, going from a small business called the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company to a $120 billion conglomerate [3M]. The company used the discoveries from the Manhattan Project–which used fluorine to distill the uranium for the first atom bomb that dropped over Hiroshima–to develop a magic fluorocarbon fluid called PFOA. Dupont used PFOA to create Teflon, a coating used by hundreds of companies to manufacture miraculous–and toxic–non-stick cookware.” FastCompany.com, August 2^nd.

OK, we are constantly discovering stuff that is really bad for us that we have been using for years. What’s difference here? Big reality: The use of PFOS and PFOA chemical components, which actually accounted for 3M’s meteoric rise in corporate value, were apparently known by 3M to be mega-toxic since the 1970s.

“[The] dangers presented by these industrial chemicals have been known for decades, not just a few months or years. A lawsuit filed by [the State of] Minnesota against 3M, the company that first developed and sold PFOS and PFOA, the two best-known PFAS compounds, has revealed that the company knew that these chemicals were accumulating in people’s blood for more than 40 years. 3M researchers documented the chemicals in fish, just as the Michigan scientist did, but they did so back in the 1970s. That same decade, 3M scientists realized that the compounds they produced were toxic. The company even had evidence back then of the compounds’ effects on the immune system, studies of which are just now driving the lower levels put forward by the ATSDR, as well as several states and the European Union.

“The suit, which the Minnesota attorney general filed in 2010, charges that 3M polluted groundwater with PFAS compounds and ‘knew or should have known’ that these chemicals harm human health and the environment, and ‘result in injury, destruction, and loss of natural resources of the State.’ The complaint argues that 3M ‘acted with a deliberate disregard for the high risk of injury to the citizens and wildlife of Minnesota.’ 3M settled the suit for $850 million in February, and the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office released a large set of documents — including internal studies, memos, emails, and research reports — detailing what 3M knew about the chemicals’ harms.

“Some of the documents had been under seal since 2005 as a result of a separate lawsuit over PFAS contamination in Minnesota. And the documents had been in the EPA’s possession for at least 18 years: In 2000, 3M gave the EPA hundreds of documents it had withheld from the agency, resulting in more than $1.5 million in penalties in 2006 for 244 violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act. Even so, for years the EPA did nothing. Even as a few government officials and company scientists understood the vast dangers they posed, PFAS were allowed to spread into groundwater and then drinking water, into people and their children, into animals, plants and the food system where they remain today…

“As a staff epidemiologist at 3M, Geary Olsen has had a wealth of data at his fingertips. The company he’s worked for since at least 1998 makes more than 55,000 products and has more than 90,000 employees. Olsen had access to internal information about both and has been able to combine them to pursue the kinds of scientific questions most researchers can only dream of being able to ask and answer…

“Olsen’s findings, written up in an draft report in October 2001, were clear. There was a positive association between the amount of PFOA in workers’ blood and their levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, states the report, on which Olsen is listed as the principal investigator. The report devoted more than 20 tables to triglycerides and cholesterol, detailing a relationship that later studies would confirm: PFOA increased people’s levels of triglycerides, which are a type of fat, and cholesterol, both of which can increase the chance of heart disease. The results were in keeping with rat evidence, as the report noted.

“Yet less than two years later, when Olsen and the three co-authors on the report — all 3M employees — published an article based on the same research, it downplayed this key finding. Indeed, according to the study, which ran in the March 2003 issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, ‘There were no substantial changes in hematological, lipid, hepatic, thyroid, or urinary parameters consistent with the known toxicological effects of PFOS or PFOA’ — a statement that appears to contradict the authors’ earlier finding.” Sharon Lerner writing for the July 31^st TheIntercept.com. And no, this is not an example of the Trump administration’s trying to shut down the EPA; this particular horrible casts a dark shadow across many prior administration on both sides of the aisle.

We live an exceptionally complex world of too many ideas, too much technology, too many financial structures… such that very few of us are equipped to understand and deal with. Instead, we depend on our government to protect us from substantial harm generated by companies and powerful people who do not care about people, who only care about profits, and are unmoved by the “collateral damage” of their knowing manufacture of killing and health-destroying substances. We desperately need our government to do its job, to maintain those necessary regulations to protect the public, and to the extent that they fail to do so, we need to hold those at the top of the companies and those administrative agencies personally responsible for the harm they have caused or allowed to continue unchecked.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the last thing most Americans need is a pullback on regulations that otherwise protect us from harm because they are inconvenient to greedy profiteers willing to kill or decimate people for a buck… with governmental complicity.