I've alluded to the fact that I spent many years working on a nation-wide(US) water testing project once and that I don't own the results, they were never published, and I can't specifically give away those results that I don't own. All of this recent talk about PFAs in water is absolutely killing me. This new water testing is going to take place over the next three years, and it's important to note that it's *only* talking about a handful of chemicals.
I've found that particularly US-based people really think their water is great and vastly overestimate how great it is. It comes out of the tap, you drink it and you don't die of waterborne illnesses. Woohoo. Really, it's an accomplishment.
But until you spend time in a water testing lab you don't really begin to realize how much isn't tested for in that water you drink and bathe in. It's just not possible.
People would ask me all the time "How do I get my water tested for everything?" You can't. Think of the story recently about how many chemicals are in plastics, for instance. 16,000-ish and over 4,000 that are potentially hazardous. Basically zero of those are tested for in any way whatsoever. To get something tested, someone has to care enough that it's there in the first place. Then someone has to create testing procedures and standards. Then there has to be a market for that test.
Let's JUST talk about PFAs. You know how many there are? Ballpark is ~15,000 different PFAs. You know how many are tested in this new EPA program? 25.
Now that we've established that, just how likely is it that testing will find PFAs in YOUR water in the US?
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/
Pretty likely.
While I can't really talk about what states are likely to find if they honestly look, what I do talk about, and have for probably 20 years now, is what I did when I realized what's really in your water. I put in a whole home filter outside of our home to filter out a lot of stuff for showering and hand washing. No one so much as cleans vegetables here unless the water comes from the reverse osmosis system in our kitchen. Drinking water, ice, pasta water, fruit and veggie washing water, etc all comes from that.
I'm very sensitive to the fact that not everyone can do all of that. It's a step in the right direction that the EPA is beginning to do something about this, but it's far later than it should be and doesn't go nearly far enough. All I can say is that you should demand better, and not just about PFAs, but all contaminants in your water supply.
And before anyone asks, yes, the spring water on the homestead is about as clean as you can find anymore. Under 10 TDS and no contaminants that I've found to date. Again, can't test for everything even if you wanted to and had a million dollars to throw at it. It was a major selling point on the property for us.
I'm back with more on this. You might wonder if I'm going to ever let this go, and the answer is, no. I have decades of rage built up over this that can only safely begin to come out now that more of this is becoming widely known.
I just learned something that I actually didn't know about this before, and I think it's worth sharing.
By now we all, hopefully, know that DuPont made billions on PFAs, all while knowing since the 60's that the mice they tested with PFAs died, and since about the 70's that the people in their manufacturing facilities who worked with PFAs were dying.
I also recommend reverse osmosis as the most comprehensive solution to getting it out of your water. Whether that's from your local water utility or in your own house is yet to be determined. Please keep an eye on what your local utility chooses to do, and encourage them NOT to use the full 5 years they're allowed to use to deal with this.
What I did not know until now, is that DuPont, realizing that everyone would have to get THEIR chemicals out of YOUR water bought one of the leading manufacturers of reverse osmosis technology, so the could profit on the back end of killing people. They're planning on making upwards of 4 BILLION PER YEAR from the cleanup if they can convince utilities to use their products.
Do not give any money, whether yourself(I'm not even sure they make direct to consumer products) or your local utilities to Desalitech Ltd.. That's just stuffing more money in DuPont's pockets after THEY did this to YOU.
There's a pretty good article today on Vox about this. I distinctly remember the author being on NPR shooting down immunity debt once, because she interrupted the host mid-introduction when she said "post-pandemic" to say "mid-pandemic" and I had so much hope. Then she said something wishy-washy about masks and suggested washing your hands better. But, that was at least a couple years ago and not a lot of people were actively shooting down immunity debt, so good for her.
Anyway, onto the article today. Overall it's good. It details some risks, what to do, recommends reverse osmosis as your best bet. There's a lot of good info here.
What do I hate? This:
"While their health risks are concerning — and scientists still have a lot to learn about them — it can be helpful to think of PFAS in the context of some other common toxins, says Ducatman. If you had “the choice between smoking a pack [of cigarettes] a day or being in one of those high-PFAS populations,” he says, “high-PFAS population is way safer.”"
I really don't know why anyone feels the need to compare every health threat to smoking a pack a day. Like, what is this? 1985?
Avoid PFAs wherever you can.
https://www.vox.com/even-better/24135052/pfas-forever-chemicals-health-testing-exposure
I know I say this often, but, ubiquitous is the right word for PFAs.
https://truthout.org/articles/forever-chemicals-ubiquitous-in-water-atmosphere-in-great-lakes-basin/
"The levels of PFAS in precipitation did not correlate with whether or not an area in the Great Lakes Basin was heavily industrialized, lead author Chunjie Xia, a postdoctoral associate at Indiana University, told The Hill.
“The levels in precipitation don’t depend on the population,” said Xia. “They are similar in Chicago, which is heavily populated, and at Eagle Harbor, Michigan, where there’s maybe 500 people living in a 25-kilometer radius.”
“That tells us the levels are ubiquitous,” he said."
Fantastic article today from ProPublica on 3M and PFAs in everyone's blood. I know I've mostly focused on DuPont here, but they're not the only ones with blame. I once briefly partnered with 3M on a project and I found them to be the most objectionable company I ever worked with. Much like DuPont, they knew how toxic it was, going back to at least the 70's. They knew what they were doing, and they chose profits.
"Rats that had more fish meal in their diets, she discovered, tended to have higher levels of PFOS, suggesting that the chemical had spread through the food chain and perhaps through water. In male lab rats, PFOS levels rose with age, indicating that the chemical accumulated in the body. But, curiously, in female rats the levels sometimes fell. Hansen was unsettled when toxicology reports indicated why: Mother rats seemed to be offloading the chemical to their pups. Exposure to PFOS could begin before birth.
Another study confirmed that Scotchban and Scotchgard were sources of the chemical. PFOS wasn’t an official ingredient in either product, but both contained other fluorochemicals that, the study showed, broke down into PFOS in the bodies of lab rats. Hansen and her team ultimately found PFOS in eagles, chickens, rabbits, cows, pigs and other animals. They also found 14 additional fluorochemicals in human blood, including several produced by 3M. Some were present in wastewater from a 3M factory."
https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-inside-story
When you come across the EPA touting that they're putting $300 million into what are known as "Brownfields" just know that's basically nothing.
Brownfield sites are polluted sites that are too polluted for redevelopment.
The EPA doesn't even know how many there are.
The GAO thinks there could be a million of them as of 20 years ago.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-05-94.pdf
Tons of them are contaminated with PFAs.
Even if there were "only" a million, a number I am willing to bet is an underestimation, $300 million isn't a drop in the bucket of what's required.
A kind of odd article came across my timeline this morning, and it seems to fit here, so I'd like to point it out.
https://www.newsweek.com/drinking-water-warning-hempstead-new-york-1903989
Hempstead New York's Mayor is sounding the alarm about 1,4-dioxane in their water. He's also tying it to the EPA's new PFA requirements in asking for the federal government to buy them a new water treatment system. To be clear, I know of no reason that PFAs and dioxane would be tied together. PFAs are fluorinated, that's what the "F" tells you in PFA. Dioxane is C4H8O2. I know of no process, off hand, that uses both. They are both pollutants, but that's as far as they go in the same category.
What's really odd to me here is that the EPA has a thing called the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR). Every few years they pick another set of chemicals and test water across the country for those chemicals.
UCMR 3 was from 2013-2015 and I distinctly remembered two things about it. One, dioxane was on the list. Two, New York had a very high incidence of dioxane being over acceptable limits. If New York wasn't top in the nation, it was at least pretty close.
So I looked up UCMR 3(https://www.epa.gov/dwucmr/occurrence-data-unregulated-contaminant-monitoring-rule#3), downloaded the data, searched it for Hempstead, and counted it up. Hempstead had 30 tests for dioxane over those two years and 25 of them tested high. Some of them ridiculously high.
Now I wonder. Did Hempstead ignore it for the last decade and now sees an opportunity to try to get the federal government to pay for their water treatment? Is that why they're mentioning it in the same breath as PFAs now? Or did they do something, and it wasn't enough?
The article just leads to more questions than answers, and the take home message here is that your water is almost certainly contaminated with tons of crap that people know about, and tons of crap that people don't know about. The only way to protect yourself is to clean it yourself.
Reverse osmosis is probably your best bet to get stuff that you know about and don't know about out of your water. While it's said to not be 100% effective for dioxane, if you had one, single point, method to use, that would still be it.
I've got a few DMs overnight asking about PFAs in masks, and so rather than discuss it all in private, here's my thoughts.
In short:
Yes. Some masks will test positive for PFAs.
No. I don't think it's a big concern.
Here's why. The spreadsheet going around about 3M products, at least the version I've seen, absolutely does list the Aura and some of their filters for some of their reusable masks like the 6503, which I own and use, but in extremely tiny amounts. A cup of water from your sink, unfiltered, probably has more than your mask.
You're, probably, talking tiny amounts that are due to manufacturing. Do I trust 3M about that? No. From professional and personal experience I wouldn't trust 3M if they told me the sky was blue. Don't trust them about anything. Would it surprise me if I later found out that they soaked the Aura in PFAs for a week to make sure it didn't get wet? No. There are some true believers in PFAs in that company who think they're the greatest thing and should be on everything. Do I think that's what's going on? No.
If I found out that they did, in fact, soak them, would I avoid them? Of course. But that doesn't mean you stop masking. Even if EVERY mask in the world tested positive for PFAs, I'd pick my poison and mask up when I needed to.
But, really, manufacturing is a real problem for trace amounts of PFAs. They're everywhere. I once knew a guy who fixed manufacturing machines. He worked for a big company and had a multi-state region where he just travelled around and fixed machines on manufacturing lines when they went down. Back before people worried about PFAs much, he had an SOP he followed, and the last step on most things was to spray the parts he replaced down with a PFA spray. Why? Because it kept grease out of the product on the line. Everything coming off of those manufacturing lines would have some trace of PFAs on them, even though the company who was responsible for the products had no idea.
This hasn't really gotten any better since. Supply chains are absolutely riddled with PFAs. Even companies trying their absolute best have very little control over it in the end.
The paper that's often cited about masks and PFAs is the following, and I believe it's really the only one.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.2c00019
What you have to realize about this is that if you dig into the supplementary info, there was *some* PFA contamination on the N95 they tested. But the vast majority of it was on "RC-1" through "RC-6", and "FF". RC here stands for reusable cloth, and the FF is a mask designed for, and marketed to, firefighters.
Let's deal with the firefighter's one first. Firefighters are, unfortunately, laden with PFAs. Firefighting foams for Class B fires are basically PFA foams. While they're being phased out, they still exist. Firefighting equipment then is often soaked in PFAs. I assume the mask in the study for firefighters is soaked in PFAs for some fire resistance.
Now, the reusable cloth masks. I hope no one's using those today. But, let's stop and think this through for a moment. If cloth masks have PFAs, what does that say about my clothes? I hate to tell you, but, a lot of clothes have PFAs.
Yes, so does bedding. Carpets. Paints. The seats in your car.
I've had a series of revelations in my life through my research. In the 90's and the following decades I removed everything that I could that off gassed VOCs. Then I removed plastics. Then I got rid of everything that I could find that had PFAs.
Proportionally, the first two weren't that hard. PFAs are damn near impossible.
So what do you really need to focus on? *Not ingesting them*. I think that's intuitively clear. Sure, you don't want to touch poison, but you REALLY don't want to pour a glass of it and drink it, right?
In order of most important:
Clean your water. I think I've discussed this ad nauseam and everyone's probably tired of it.
Remove it from your food sources. Yes, the FDA banned it from food packaging in February, but that doesn't take effect until around 2026. When I worked in the national lab system you know what we called that? Not today's problem. Because anything that was funded or unfunded during the next presidential administration was just as likely to happen as not happen in the end.
Look out for cosmetics. If not ingesting it is the main goal, not rubbing it on yourself everyday is the next goal.
Math time!
The paper cited above about PFAs in masks was designed to study their accumulation in dumps. I don't want to gloss over that, but, I'm going to anyway.
On an individual mask basis, you have to do some math to figure out how much PFA contamination you're talking about, because they were looking at it per square meter of mask materials.
The N95 in the study tested out at 15.2 micrograms per square meter. Your mask is obviously not a square meter.
I'm going to make an assumption and do some rounding here, just to get a ballpark number.
I pulled a 3M Aura off of a hook by our door(my wife wears one to get the mail, or slap on if the FedEx guy keeps knocking and won't go away) and a quick measurement tells me it's around ~6" x 8" or about 300 square centimeters. There's 10,000 square centimeters in a square meter, so, one Aura mask is roughly 3% of a square meter.
15 * 0.03 = 0.45 micrograms of 3 PFAs combined on a single mask. Most limits for PFAs are listed in ppt(ng/L) or ng/kg body weight. So, 0.45 micrograms is 450 nanograms.
So, in that same ballpark, what does it mean?
*I am not saying that there is a "healthy" PFA dose. Your body struggles to get rid of it and it doesn't ever break down.*
The European Food Safety Authority says that the tolerable weekly intake of PFAs is 4.4ng/kg of body mass. That would mean ~220 pound person could eat their N95 every week and stay within the limits(please don't).
The state of Virginia says that your water can legally contain 150,000 ng/L. In Virginia you could drink 333 N95's worth of PFAs continually(please don't).
Under the new EPA guidelines that will go into effect, maybe, years from now water must be under 4ppt. So, one N95 might contain the amount of PFAs in a month's worth of your drinking water if you drank 3L a day, and if that goes into effect and is enforced.
What does it mean for what you're actually exposed to already?
In a study some paints had upwards of 700 ppm total Fluorine. If, as expected, the PFA in the paint formulation was 6:2 FTOH, that would be around 50 ppm of that PFA, or 50,000,000 ppt. Thank goodness we don't ingest paint, but, I'm willing to bet we're all surrounded by it. How well encapsulated is it?
https://habitablefuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/97-pfas-in-paints.pdf
In a bad scenario, my friend who is now facing kidney failure has been drinking neighborhood water that was tested at ~59,000 ppt in 2016 for a couple of decades, or so. He may have been drinking upwards of 180,000 nanograms a day. That's the same as ingesting 400 masks worth A DAY. I do not recommend this.
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/#about
Even in rain water, tested amounts of PFAs were between 1 and 40 nanograms per liter in urban environments, or, often upwards of an N95 masks worth of PFA for every 10L of rain water.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
Yes, there's studies that absorbing PFAs through the skin is similar to ingesting them.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278691520300016
If the data we have on N95's is in the right ballpark, it's just not high on the spectrum of PFA concerns in my opinion.
@BE ewww. Do you know if the water filters you attach to a kitchen faucet filter out all that? That's what I have.
NSF/ANSI 53 means it's certified to remove at least some PFA/PFOAs. The removal limit for certification varies based on location, but, that's the code you're looking for in a filter.
@BE ok thanks, I'll look at that. I've thought about getting a whole house filter. Are they hard to install?
Most of them are just an inlet and an outlet in the end. I didn't install our current one, so I can't really speak to it. We did it while we were moving into this house, and I think the plumber knocked it out in a couple hours overall.
I'm seeing a counter top filter system with a rating NSF/ANSI 58, is the higher number more effective?
And a few weeks ago on our evening news was a report that boiling water removes PFAS, so the next day I boiled water before drinking it, but when I thought about it, it made no sense, so I stopped...
Do you know if sparkling water beverage cans are plastic lined?
(Sorry, I have a lot of questions, and am excited to see you posting on this topic...)
Don't be sorry! I love the questions.
NSF 58 is specifically about reverse osmosis systems. There's a handful of different NSF certifications for different types of water filtering.
https://d2evkimvhatqav.cloudfront.net/documents/water_58_insert.pdf
Think of it as a minimum requirement. Most systems that meet the standards, surpass it.
I can't think of any reason that boiling water would remove PFAs. That's wild. They're way too stable to break down in boiling water(thus, forever chemicals) and they're not alive, so they don't die like bacteria, for example.
But, boiling kind of brings up something that should probably be discussed and that's distilled water. Distilling water alone won't remove all of the PFAs, despite some bad info out there. Distillation separates things based on boiling points, and some PFAs(remember, there's 15,000+) have boiling points around 100C. If you have lab quality distilled water, maybe, but I wouldn't do it at home and expect pure water. Just an FYI at what they might have been getting at there.
The sparkling water question is fantastic, and off the top of my head I don't know! I know sodas and other acidic substances(think tomato sauce) have used various linings to protect the aluminum can, and often those have had toxic substances that leech into the food/drink. I don't know about sparkling water, though.
Thank you so much!
The boiling water thing made me wonder if the PFAs were somehow adhering to the interior of the teakettle, which also didn't seem good. Otherwise I think it would just concentrate them, as the quantity of water was reduced through steam...
I had hoped that canned water was better than (plastic) bottled water. It has no metallic taste, but I do wonder.
I'm looking at getting the RO counter top filter system, but need to save up a little for that.
We mostly drink & eat from glass or ceramic ware, and cook/store food in the same (plus metal, for stove top cooking), but it can all still feel overwhelming.
I absolutely hear you. Little bit at a time is all you can do. We removed all non-stick PFA stuff a long time ago. After that we went item by item removing plastics. It's a whole thing, but, you either consent to industrial pollution or you don't!
@BE @FiddleSix I read about that boiling water thing too and thought "what." But then I came across this article that explains a study about boiling water then filtering it. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/boiling-tap-water-could-help-remove-80-percent-of-its-microplastics-study-suggests-180983874/
I've started switching all my kitchen storage to glass or ceramic with the cloth/beeswax tops. What do you think of silicone storage containers?
That makes sense about microplastics and I'd never seen it before. Thank you for sharing it!
We went all glass storage, too, a while back, and either cast iron or ceramic coated cookware. I always say, though, that someone CAN legally sneak one or more of the 15,000+ PFAs into your kitchen by claiming "PFOA free" or even "PFA free" and then using GenX or PTFE because of legal definitions. It's always a shell game with some of these companies.
Silicone is a perfect way to discuss something I like to bring up. You just don't know what you don't know when it comes to "stuff" in your products. When companies aren't required to say exactly what's in their products, they tend not to, and then how do you know what to look for?
I use silicone spatulas and a few storage containers. You have to trust the seller at this point of the game with them. They're often made with varying amounts of methylsiloxanes. The toxicity of which isn't well studied, but, I feel comfortable using the ones I have.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412018318105
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4884743/
Important to note, the second source mentions "In conclusion, it should be noted that the safety of application decreases with the decrease in silicone particle size" and that's why you might have heard that methylsilioxanes in car emissions are thought to be quite toxic.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c03797
tldr; Silicone >>> Plastic > Non-stick overall to me.
@BE @FiddleSix i also recently switched to ceramic skillets. I use silicone spatulas since they don't damage the skillets but I've seen some silicone food storage things. I think I'm going to get some of those for hiking and stuff like that, i currently use plastic for those activities since I need something lightweight that can't shatter
I use silicone ones for hiking. Great use case. I also don't use the refrigerator ice maker, so I make blocks of ice each night to make iced tea with the next day in silicone storage containers.
@FiddleSix @BE it seems like a lot of outlets saw the study headline about boiling water but didn't bother to read it to find the part about having to filter it!
@FiddleSix @BE I just saw this cartoon that relates ...
https://mastodon.social/@jensorensen/112231730367033010
So true 😂 And you have to laugh, because otherwise....well, blame the companies that made those choices for you without your consent.
@BE I only drink water that's been through a British Berkefeld gravity filter (ceramic 10 micron? and activated charcoal).
Would that get rid of PFAs or are they ionically dissolved and therefore impossible to get rid of by filtration (or just potentially too tiny)?
That's a great question, and to the best of my knowledge I don't think either of those would remove a high percent of PFAs.
I wasn't familiar with this filter, so I dug into it just a little bit, and it seems more geared towards heavy metal removal, while it does do other things.
If you can find specs on it that specifically list amounts of different materials it filters out, link to it here because now I'm curious about it.
@BE Here's some data for their pressurised systems (which should be similar). They've had proper independent testing done too, I'll try to root that out.
OK, so, better on some organics than I would have thought, but, nothing specifically on PFAs after a quick look through.
It's certified for NSF/ANSI 401 which NSF says is:
"This standard offers up to 15 specific contaminant reduction claims. Some of the most popular categories include prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications, herbicides, pesticides and chemical compounds."
https://www.nsf.org/knowledge-library/nsf-ansi-42-53-and-401-filtration-systems-standards
@BE I just read this, it's pretty alarming and reminded me of your post.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/04/pfas-drinking-water-maine/678040/
Thank you! That's an excellent article and includes the elusive primary source of the 15,000 PFAs info, too!
https://comptox.epa.gov/dashboard/chemical-lists/PFASSTRUCT
Two thoughts - One, there's no way Maine thought spreading that around was a good idea in 2016 unless they simply didn't consult anyone. We've known PFAs were bad for decades before that.
Two - I'd change the headline from "The U.S. Is About to Uncover a Crisis in Drinking Water" to "The U.S. Is About to Uncover a Crisis in Drinking Water If It Honestly Looks"
@BE I wondered why anyone would think it was a good idea to use that sludge for food fertilizer 🤢
There was an article about PFAs in Maine.
Thank you for sharing! That's funny, someone else linked what appears to be the same article above, but they changed the title from "The U.S. Is About to Uncover a Crisis in Drinking Water" to now "Maine Is a Warning for America’s PFAS Future"
I wonder if someone decided that uncovering a crisis was too spot on and if they changed anything else in the article itself.
@BE Strange they would change the title on the fly.
Yeah, I agree. You reminded me to go look at the internet archives on it, and it looks like they changed the title sometime within the first 3 hours it was out.
@BE don’t mind me, I’m over here being blackpilled about the level of pfas in fucking olive oil. I put like a quarter cup in my breakfast smoothie every day. This world is so fucked.
I hear you! I hate it. I *am* honestly mad, and have been for decades, that the decision to make them ubiquitous was made, intentionally, by companies. They knew, and they chose ubiquitous PFAs for profit.
The Veteran Hearing Aid Fiasco was also a 3M absolute fraud.
The company knew for years they were selling faulty devices to the troops and when they were brought to court they attempted to relocate the program to a subsidiary and claim bankruptcy to avoid payment.
It did not work. They paid:
"250,000 Veterans Agree To $6B Settlement With Earplug Company"
I didn't know all about that. Thank you for sharing! I forget the exact details, but at one point along the way DuPont very slightly changed their name and claimed that they were a new company and didn't know anything about PFAs, too.
@BE @surfingreg I was once friends with someone who grew up in Oakdale MN (near 3M), and moved into a house in a subdivision near where there is now a ground water pump due to dumping. At the time, I don’t think it was there.
After a while, all the neighbors started to get ill, and they put 2 and 2 together, and listed the large 4 bedroom house for sale. A young, single, 3M employee purchased the house.
One parent is hyper chemical sensitive, the other died of cancer.
... so if it's in precipitation, it's in my well water? Oof.
I'm pretty sure the water system my husband installed last year has a RO filter in the chain of filters somewhere. I guess I'm asking when he comes home this evening.
I hate to put it bluntly, but, if it's open to rain water collection, then yes. More to the point, you'll probably want to see if you're near any known PFA contamination sites. Groundwater unfortunately accumulates PFAs from lots of contaminated sites.
You can find some of the worst here:
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/
But it's really hit and miss as to whether your groundwater's even been tested in the end.
The good news is if you're using RO in there then in all likelihood you're good.
Thanks for that link! It looks like we're in good shape; the three closest tested places are 'below limit'.
Also, I discovered there's a My Address in Australia! Cool!!
Oh, and one other thing. Don't worry about being blunt, especially about stuff like this. I'm pretty thick-skinned in general.
@BE As a former cig smoker, arguments like this are tactically designed to make nonsmokers feel comfortable about doing the thing, and make smokers also feel more comfortable about doing the thing because "fuck it I already smoke cigs."
@BE $300/site isn't enough to pay for a single site visit for anything remotely rural.
@BE I had similar thoughts about the "PFAs in masks" thing, glad to hear I wasn't totally off-base.
@BE Thank you for taking the time to share your expertise. I'm sure we all appreciate it!
@BE
So glad to have you around sharing your knowledge.
@BE
afaik, that study about masks and PFAS that you linked to was funded by the US govt, including the EPA, which has been/is complicit in covering PFAS up in the first place. I wouldn’t trust the study after following the money (see end of this write up of authors of study acknowledging funding or support by multiple agencies: https://www.acs.org/pressroom/newsreleases/2022/march/most-face-masks-dont-expose-wearers-to-harmful-levels-of-pfas.html)
for anyone who is at high risk of developing cancer, it’s probably not a bad idea to include this knowledge in their risk analysis re PFAS in masks. no idea what levels might be being inhaled, even if negligible; a big issue with PFAS is that they build up in our systems.
I just don’t want folks to brush it away off-hand. it’s important info.
Someone asked me if I could source some of my info on PFAs, and the EPAs decisions, and that's entirely fair. Anyone who reads my posts knows I generally put links to everything. I *may* have been rage posting, while simultaneously trying to be careful about what I was saying, about this yesterday.
First - Are there really 15,000 different PFAs?
It's a pretty widely cited number, and I'm going to admit that I don't know exactly how many there are from a direct source. I think you'll find that number cited any time you look it up.
In lieu of having a source for that info specifically, here's a paper on what the class of chemicals is comprised of:
https://setac.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ieam.258
Second - I keep reading that only 6 PFAs are in the program, but you said 25.
I'm a lab chemist at heart. When I said 25 that's how many are in the *testing* protocol.
".In December 2019, EPA published Method
533, which includes a total of 25 PFAS (14 of the 18 PFAS
in 537.1 plus an additional 11 “short chain” PFAS) and
specifies isotope dilution quantitation."
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-01/documents/pfas_methods-sampling_tech_brief_7jan2020-update.pdf
The limits that are imposed don't even cover all of those 25, but just the 6 *categories* that you see being reported, which are only comprised of 5 actual PFAs, and a mixture thereof:
PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS, PFNA, HFPO-DA and "Mixtures containing two or more" of those first 5.
https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/and-polyfluoroalkyl-substances-pfas
Third - Is this a serious attempt to do something? Or just some placation?
Putting my words down carefully, the EPA is regulating 5 chemicals in a category of over 15,000 in which over 1,400 of them are known to be in common use as of 5 years ago.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/em/d0em00291g
I'm glad to see some other sources have picked this up and are thinking about it critically. Here's a few I read today:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/11/pfas-limits-epa-drinking-water
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epa-first-ever-drinking-water-regulations-pfas-forever-chemicals/
https://theconversation.com/pfas-forever-chemicals-why-epa-set-federal-drinking-water-limits-for-these-health-harming-contaminants-227621