Maybe per year? Paid out by all former executives from the point PFAS were manufactured?... after all, if they claim responsibility and the associated bonuses for the good stuff, they should be held accountable for the bad too, right?

The company's damage starts in the 1960's and wast most actively protected by states, in the 80s. Your link barely covers only to 2012.

- They lobby the government

- Their lobbyists go to work to the government, and then go back to work to the company and so on

The government won't touch them.

That's clearly not true, as evidenced by this settlement.

This is certainly a better result than the Purdue opioid lawsuit where the Sackler family received immunity and in exchange for a $6B settlement.

That's the bare minimum we should set. China/USSR had a more severe consequence for officers of the company that isn't likely feasible here in the US but is probably the real deterrent to this behavior in future criminal endeavors.

Completely agree. In China, it's pretty straightforward - you become the nail that sticks out. If you fuck with the population at large and make people sick, or you rob them blind, etc... it doesn't matter if you have or you haven't given The Party their cut of the action - your C-Suite will all disappear. A few will be lucky enough to be re-educated.

Whereas in America if you beat the regulators or catch them sleeping on the job, you'll have one side of the political aisle cheering you on no matter how many people you kill.

Nothing of note was accomplished. People just switched to fentanyl.

I didn't realize even judges go out of their way to try to make parties settle out of court.

No, it isn't.

> and tantamount to a judge not doing their job

No, it isn't.

> ... which is to oversee the proper discovery and application of precedent.

That is an extremely limited and narrow view of a judge's job. That's part of their job, but very far from all of it.

> I'd even make the contention that this fundamentally deprives people of their right to due process

No, it doesn't. People are encouraged to settle; they aren't forced to. If you insist on a trial, you can get one.

> and if it is the case that the judiciary cannot handle case loads

It takes a long time to bring a case to trial. I think that at least part of the bottleneck is the judges' time, but I cannot prove that.

> we need to start talking about the structural reasons resulting in that.

I would agree with that.

By and large, it takes as long as it does, especially based on cases between actors with drastically different resource pools from which to pool to acquire legal representation, because of fundamental limitations on the ability of information to be unambiguously extracted by a legal team (defendants team in finding docs that match criteria for discovery), the plaintiffs team (to comb through the discovered docs for meaning; thos is where malicious compliance or poorly worded queries can be disasterous for the amount of work it takes to sift through paper), transformed (arranged into a cross ref'able set of docs to be used in further proceedings), and loaded (brought before a jury).

The work of a trial is simple given good faith on the parts of all parties. I wager that happens much less frequently than we'd all like to believe.

When the prime arbiters of the judiciary start resorting to "just bypass us" there is a terrible, terrible problem here.

I mean thats how it often ends up, but extremely happy its not happening now. Maybe they will make sure form now on they don't do this highly amoral and criminal stuff, and maybe other companies will notice too. Jail time for CEO at that time would be a bonus, but we are not there yet.

Not sure if it'll do much to dissuade any companies from embarking on the next massive environmental fuckup, but one can hope.

0. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...

1. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/pfas-project/companies-face-bi...

That claim seems suspect. Dupont booked around 4 billion in profits in 2016[1]. If the claim was true, it would mean PFOA made up around a quarter of their business. However, if you look at their net sales/profit by business segment[2] along with segment descriptions[3], there's basically no way that PFOA made up a quarter of their profits. They make too much other stuff for that to be the case.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/540512/net-income-of-dup...

[2] https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...

[3] https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...

Or them, meaning us? These fines will find their way to the market and we will be the ones paying.

This is simply the pseudo cost of doing business for these multi-nationals.

What needs to happen is that shareholder value is eradicated. Pension funds, banks, hedge funds, retail investors, they should all lose their money. Every last cent of it. Only if shareholder value is eradicated will shareholders start demanding executives follow procedures that prevent disasters like this from happening.

Holding the executives responsible is fun, but we all know the next executive is gonna be ruthless and try and get away with it anyway.

They might! There is certainly some evidence of that, but the evidence is not remotely clear cut. This is not as simple as the linkage between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, for instance. If there are negative health impacts, the impacts are several orders of magnitude lower than cigarette smoking.

So why exactly should 3M executives be stripped of their assets and pilloried? We've been using these chemicals in massive quantities for a century, they've been intensely studied, and we're still not exactly sure what impact they might have.

Florine chemistry has been killing chemists and factory workers for hundreds of years, but reasonable precautions let people use many horrifically toxic substances without significant issue. But for some reason people keep thinking new = safe when by default it’s been obvious that stuff containing Pb or F is probably risky in some situations.

In most?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_toxicity

Your impression from the linked study should be that there is a large amount of uncertainty, not that there is a clear-cut link.

It is _not_ the tobacco story all over again, because the health effect of long-term tobacco use "as directed," and as occurs normally in real-life, results in an extremely massive increase in the risk of death from lung cancer, with a staggering 1 out of 4 long-term smokers (using more than 5 cigarettes a day) dying of lung cancer - something like a 5000% increase.

The health linkage between regular tobbaco use and negative health outcomes is overwhelming.

It is not the same thing here. These are small effects and difficult to notice, and there could be other confounding factors. (Maybe people in environments with lots of PFAS chemicals are exposed to other chemicals common in polluted water sources).

feel free to develop a formula, if you so desire

There's loads of things I use in every day life that I wouldn't want to ingest in odd quantities. I handle gasoline and paint thinner and dishwashing detergents and hand soap every now and then but if you tried to get me to even drink a teaspoon of it I'd probably turn you down. Is the rule now if you wouldn't drink a glass of it you should never handle it in any way?

By the way, please do not drink that 26% salt brine. It will do very terrible things to your body and probably significantly hurt you.

> Is the rule now if you wouldn't drink a glass of it you should never handle it in any way?

Some things are not safe at any level. Lead (Pb) for example. So what about PFAS? Does it accumulate in the body? What are the effects of long-term ingestion?

My question was intended to see just how serious people were, who were making the argument that PFAS weren't a thing to be concerned about.

I'd avoid drinking a glass of motor oil as well, but I still prefer having my car lubricated at the end of the day.

"A doubling of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) in maternal serum was associated with a 39% (p < 0.001) reduction in diphtheria antibody concentration in children (age 5 yr), with increased odds of falling below clinically protective values against diphtheria and tetanus at age 7 yr."

> A study of heavily exposed workers (n = 462, geometric mean serum PFOA of 4048 ng/mL) detected significantly increased incident mortality for cirrhosis (relative risk = 3.87, 95% CI 1.18–12.7) and liver cancer (relative risk = 6.69, 95% CI 1.71–26.2)

These are NOT small effects. These are strong p-values with large hazard ratios over and over again throughout the entire review.

Those are a very small part of the affected ones, probably firefighters or 3M production workers. Remember that the dosage makes the poison.

Or are you going to argue about how antibodies work?

Again, the headline figure you're quoting sounds alarming, but if it's accurate and applicable to the broader population, then we should be seeing that effect outside the lab as well.

Should we wait for that to happen if the risk is obvious?

I have no domain knowledge here but those CIs are quite large and both get close to 1 at the lower edge.

But again, I haven’t read the paper! Just chiming in with some half-forgotten epidemiology. :-)

Yes, it shows that with 5% probability the risk is only 1.18 - why choose to focus on those 5%? According to the study there is an equal chance that the relative risk is 12.7 times normal, why should we ignore that?

Your reading of the CIs is off. It isn't telling you that there's a 5% chance that the real risk is 1.18. It's saying there's a 5% chance the real risk doesn't lie in the CI, and could be anywhere outside the CI, including 1 (no effect).

Here's the main point. Increase the significance level slightly, say to 97% (if this is a 95% CI, or 92% if this is a 90%, etc). Then a CI that large and that close to 1 at the left edge will turn into a CI that includes 1. The effect is not significant at all at that level. It wouldn't be saying the true effect is significant with some probability or whatever you seemed to be interpreting CIs to say. It would be saying there's no effect.

This is markedly different from the case of cigarettes, where the p-values are astronomically small. Since earlier comments seem to compare these chemical to cigarettes.

At what concentrations? And what are the concentrations normal people are exposed to and/or accumulate? (There are lots of numbers in the paper, and I can't tell if any of them answer these particular questions at a quick glance.)

> Epidemiological studies have revealed associations between exposure to specific PFAS and a variety of health effects, including altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, and cancer. Concordance with experimental animal data exists for many of these effects. However, information on modes of action and adverse outcome pathways must be expanded, and profound differences in PFAS toxicokinetic properties must be considered in understanding differences in responses between the sexes and among species and life stages.

"Toxicokinetics describes how the body handles a chemical, as a function of dose and time"

Are you actually interested in the answers?

"A doubling of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) in maternal serum was associated with a 39% (p < 0.001) reduction in diphtheria antibody concentration in children (age 5 yr), with increased odds of falling below clinically protective values against diphtheria and tetanus at age 7 yr."

> A study of heavily exposed workers (n = 462, geometric mean serum PFOA of 4048 ng/mL) detected significantly increased incident mortality for cirrhosis (relative risk = 3.87, 95% CI 1.18–12.7) and liver cancer (relative risk = 6.69, 95% CI 1.71–26.2)

That paper is nowhere near as conclusive as you're painting it.

(and let the future generations clean the mess if it turns out we missed a few factor in the computation of the "safe" level).

come on. At some point we will have to understand that, no, we can not accept an hypothetical risk because the objective gains are bigger. Hypothetical risk should be made objective before starting any kind of production of chemicals at any large scale. The world is already filled with dangersous stuff. Enough is enough.

The big issue is that usually the balance is: "a bit of a health concern" versus "huge economical benefits". We're comparing apples and oranges.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-3m-pfas-toxic-foreve...

Or asbestos, or leaded gasoline, or leaded paint, or Oxycodone (the “opioid crisis”) and so on. This list is too long to keep track of.

GAMI recently got a lead-free aviation gasoline broadly approved: https://generalaviationnews.com/2022/09/03/gami-unleaded-fue...

Leaded avgas is for older gasoline piston aircraft. There’s still many around but overall it’s not that significant and is slowly on its way out. The exhaust is mostly released high in altitude where there is ample time for extreme dilution.

The concern is mostly for people who work at small airports, live near them, or work with these aircraft as mechanics etc.

I think there’s an unleaded 100 octane formulation in testing that will probably replace leaded gas but the general aviation industry is small and slow moving.

Oxycodone didn't cause the opioid crisis just because it's an addictive substance.

I know people who only became curious about the dark web after I used it a couple times. It just spreads, I guess.

The reason they were curious is because after some really invasive dental surgery (with lasers!) they were given a laughably small number of pills, a supply that would only last about 3 days at the recommended schedule, for an operation that the doctors know and warned them would hurt for around a week after.

I still believe harm reduction is the answer, but we're still years (possibly decades) away from a legal implementation. And it's not a full solution because you'll still have junkies, but it might become easier to help them once they don't have to totally hide themselves.

Which PFAS? At what concentrations? What's the effect size? QALY loss per person affected?

> What are you gaining from being dissembling about this entire thing? What about it rubs you the wrong way so much that you’re rationalizing its ills by spreading falsehoods?

These insinuations are horrible and unnecessary. Stop attacking the motives of people who question something, that's very much against the hacker spirit.

Many people just like questioning everything, particularly things others seem to care deeply about.

In fact such lazy comments should be downvoted more, they bring 0 to already established discussion, just water down facts so they are harder to find.

These are great questions, and maybe they should have all gotten conclusive answers before they are introduced to the market.

Prove that your crap is safe, before you sell it.

What you're suggesting is impossible.

From the first Google result I found (https://biorius.com/biorius-group/comparison-between-the-us-...)

> In Europe before selling anything, you must indeed make sure and confirm it will not harm anyone!

So I guess that’s why cosmetics and consumer goods don’t exist in the EU, eh?

I can’t help but think that’s an oversight from lack of imagination and lack of intuitive understanding of how much leaching and abrading goes on.

No they don't. Drug packaging is regulated too. It's tested for leeching, stability, etc.

I'm starting to get the feeling that many people are upset in this thread because they don't actually know what the current regulations are.

The practical implication is that your bloodstream is filled with relatively few small-molecule drugs and relatively many synthetic chemicals.

That makes no sense.

Of course a "packaging additive" only has to prove a lack of harm. What else would you prove?

[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d9/9e/63/d99e637a2aa93a9b4c88...

How were they supposed to know? How about the deformities in animals around their factory runoff? How about studies prior to mass production?

Frankly we should be considering life imprisonment for the executives, regulatory attorneys, and chief engineers, and the corporate death penalty for the company.

However safety is not absolute and corporate harms are not always clear cut, as you point out. Perhaps the standard should be something like: does this do more harm than good, maybe weighting good by ~10x. Autonomous cars don't need to be perfect, just 10x+ better than human drivers.

Asset seisures should be in addition to jail for the most egregious cases, such as the Sackler family, who got off lightly for all the harm they caused.

Wasn’t that exactly big tobacco’s and then the global warmers’ playbook? And yet, it turns out that the effects are very real but much damage done and hundreds of billions earned while we were discussing the wrong thing.

https://www.guycarp.com/insights/2020/05/california-wildfire...

A less charitable reading is that it covers 300 cities. Maybe they can filter the municipal water supply of that many cities in perpetuity with currently unavailable commercial filter technology?

If it is nationwide, then $10b is a bad punchline.

The value of those houses (as a place to live) is $0 to anyone who cares about not consuming PFAS, and thus should be $0 until the problem is fixed. I guess you can rent them out to people you don’t care about, which would make them worth >$0, but also clearly unethical.

In a society that’s functioning correctly, sane people would pass a law prohibiting consumption of water with PFAS; those houses would be declared uninhabitable, the same way a fire marshal now can declare a building uninhabitable as it violates a fire code.

When someone sells their house, the price is an agreed upon valuation by buyer and seller. It’s probably the closest to true value we’ll ever get.

How do you propose to value better?

If they are selling for more than $0, then someone values them.

Obviously humans aren’t rational actors, so assuming as much would be dumb to use as the basis of an economic system. People generally are shortsighted- they build on flood plains, for example, or use toxic building materials that cause damage long term (ex: asbestos), or whatever.

Nor should humans be expected to be rational actors. (!) You shouldn’t need a PhD in biochemistry in order to evaluate water quality impact to health, in order to buy a home. If we require people like software engineers to be full blown doctors just to rationally evaluate a place to live, we have failed as a society.

Allowing the government to declare homes uninhabitable is clearly better than a pure market based system.

Otherwise, you either live in an unusual location that makes any kind of water-related infrastructure projects very expensive - like, idk., a small settlement at a summit of a mountain, or in the middle of a desert - or something is very much broken about that place.

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/bottled-water/pfas-in...

You do understand that that’s worse for you, right?

it's not a good defense for indiscriminate contamination of water, if that's what you're trying for

Fructose is ok to consume in amounts that are typical for fruit (which is less than you‘d think), but is a metabolic disruptor in higher amounts. Liver cells have to do a lot of work to metabolize fructose, compared to glucose which needs quasi no conversion. Overworking the liver can lead to fatty liver, and worse. Glucose is harder on the pancreas and chronic high insulin seems to be really bad, so I‘d avoid that too of course. But a reasonably healthy liver can quickly buffer excess glucose (hepatocytes) and rather easily convert to glycogen and store it, in big amounts.

How can you accurately estimate any of this?

What they should be made to do is provide free filters to all of the governments to filter PFAS until a time when no PFAS is detected. Or if that's not possible, R&D until some form of it is possible then do that.

But that would probably damage the company forever, and that's bad.

If they don't wanna do it they could just spin off a 'water filter' division and then bankrupt it. Problem solved!

Because otherwise, I could incorporate as XYZ LLC and say that any blatantly illegal act that causes real harm is just a byproduct of me doing business, and that I'm not actually liable for anything that happens to anyone else during me committing said illegal acts.

The slope here is so slippery it's effectively made of banana peels.

PFAS wern't always known to be bad, and even after knowing chances are everyone reading this has some in their blood -- and most of you are doing just fine. Maybe 0.01% crappier than if you didn't have it in you, but it's a far cry from getting stabbed to death by a hired goon.

I don’t think that it is so far fetched that a corporation should be held criminally liable, and that executives should be criminally liable when they discover one of these risks and do not accurately disclose it and mitigate the risk.

It doesn’t strike me as intrinsically different to hit an LLC provided that the company knew about the impact of PFAS.

Unless executives lose freedoms (i.e., go to jail) nothing is going to change. The problem is, that wealthy ruling class can buy freedom when they need to. Those that miraculously lose freedom go to country clubs. On the other hand, if you or I rob the local convenience store (using a fire arm?) we will likely go to jail.

When they endanger the health and welfare of a child...millions of them...we pay the fine. Anyone who calls that justice is a fool.

Funny, I say similar about tobacco. That is, if a terrorist said, "I'm going to come to your country,and I'm going to sell an addictive carcinogen..." There would be protests in the streets demanding that terrorist be drone-strik'd to hell and then some.

As it is, the state and federal governments allow the product, *and* profit from it (via taxes). Talk about a page right out of an Orwellian novel.

Real life story of lawyer who goes after Duport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)?useski...

Nonstick pans, food packaging, fish, microwave popcorn, waterproof clothes, contact lenses, and so many other products.

Also potentially dangerous.

If you drink a gallon of distilled water all at once, it could screw up electrolyte balance. Screwy potassium levels can cause heart fibrillation.

I would guess that the risk of water that's coming from reverse osmosis is safe for routine use, in the context of a healthy diet.

People elsewhere do fluoride varnishes with their Dentists and that is absolutely fine and sufficient.

No it won't.

You get most of your minerals from your food, not your water. Distilled water has zero health effects.

Alas, I must concede the point: upon actual cursory research, drinking distilled water is NOT a health risk.

(I was once admitted to hospital because of crazy electrolyte levels, while presenting other symptoms as well. Is long story. Perhaps it's time for me to stop worrying about potassium...)

My family lived on distilled drinking water for years with no mineral deficiencies. RO water isn’t as deficient as distilled.

Do yourself a favor and calculate:

1) The specific minerals in the water you want to consume

2) The daily values for each of those minerals

3) Figure out the water you'd need to drink to meaningfully contribute towards hitting those DVs

Hint: It's in the tens to hundreds of gallons of water per day for tap water.

Filter the water and pop a multivitamin, expecting to get significant "minerals" from tap water is a joke.

>>> High-pressure membranes, such as nanofiltration or reverse osmosis, have been extremely effective at removing PFAS. Reverse osmosis membranes are tighter than nanofiltration membranes. This technology depends on membrane permeability. A standard difference between the two is that a nanofiltration membrane will reject hardness to a high degree, but pass sodium chloride; whereas reverse osmosis membrane will reject all salts to a high degree. This also allows nanofiltration to remove particles while retaining minerals that reverse osmosis would likely remove.

>>> Research shows that these types of membranes are typically more than 90 percent effective at removing a wide range of PFAS, including shorter chain PFAS.

https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/reducing-pfas-drinking-wa...

I’ve got one set up for my drinking water and it’s 1:1, so a gallon of waste water for every useful gallon. Others use even more.

Obviously I don’t feel great about the waste, but I’ve got two kids under 6 and I’m trying to do what I can to avoid dosing them with this crap.

I do my best to make up for it in other ways - not watering any landscaping, scraping but not rinsing dishes, water off while brushing teeth/lathering hands, low flow shower heads and toilets, etc. But I'm not aware of another way to get sufficiently clean water.

Key features

High efficiency

No need for water storage tank, but optional pressurized tank available

Real-time TDS monitoring via screen on RO unit and free Android/iOS apps.

I am willing to spend so much because of the high efficiency, live TDS monitoring and the $20 per month full maintenance plan.

Some of the higher end systems require a lot of fiddling and knowledge to run properly, and most plumbers where I live know next to nothing about whole home RO, so having the maintenance plan which covers, parts, labor and replacement filters is priceless in my book.

https://info.nsf.org/Certified/DWTU/Listings.asp?ProductFunc...

https://www.nsf.org/news/pfoa-pfos-reduction-claims-requirem...

P.S. Note the "facility" where these products are manufactured are also listed. One might also want to note that [replacement] filters may also have different country origins.

[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069

The other polluters should also contribute to cleanup rather than just using this as an excuse to further erode the USA’s industrial base.

That said if someone can convincingly show that 3M all by themselves managed to pollute the entire global water supply to a dangerous level I’ll accept it.

I'm a bit mortified that the consequences to 3M for the amount of damage caused amounts to 10.3BN-12.5BN over the course of thirteen years. They should clean up the mess they made themselves - God only knows what that would cost in the end.

Edit: Corrected 1.3BN to 10.3

3M is paying about 500 million euros for the same kind of PFAS pollution here in Antwerp and although I was thinking that is a ridiculous amount compared to the $10 billion, after all it's more per capita, so maybe it's still a "correct" amount.

I think the PFAS pollution topic is just starting being discussed in France as well, so although these fines are probably never going to fix everything, I think they do have the potential to give enough incentive to these polluters... writing that though, honestly who am I fooling?

It's going to give them incentive to hide things better and lobby harder next time, and nothing will change until executive get actual prison sentences.

I truly believe that the only way large companies can be made to behave is to make their executives actually responsible of their actions, and to give them sentences that affect them personally. The whole limited company system is harmful today.

Is that _money_ going to be used to clean it from the water?

It concerns me we’re not trying to fix the actual health danger to us

Not sure what harm you attribute to the wheel, but the harms of fire and combustion engines are currently world-class problems, such as the climate. Very much "if we knew then what we know now" situations, and with PFAS and the like, we have the opportunity to act before it becomes an issue.

Many people in history has been crushed, sometimes lethally, under various wheels.

If we go by circumstance, anything can be a danger, or a non-danger. And the solution is to be more mindful of our circumstances. What we're trying to identify in this thread are the practices that, while being immediately beneficial, are also immediately negatively impactful, even if it took us years (dozens, hundreds, or thousands thereof) to learn about the negative impacts. And following that, to be more mindful of which practices may have similar negative impacts, and be forward thinking about that possibility rather than reflectively regretful.

We certainty all do not need teflon pans. Or cars. Without massive production, such problems would be "just" local anomaly.

Every PFAS study I read seems to be pointing to ever increasing accumulation and harm. It's not hard to imagine a phase shift to a PFAS effect pandemic if we don't seriously consider PFAS curtailment as a regulatory priority.

All I had to do was search for “microplastics marine ecosystems” (taken directly from your parent post) and my search engine returned more studies than I know what to do with.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927104/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21742351/

https://journals.openedition.org/factsreports/5257

https://progearthplanetsci.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-01961-1

I can tell you didn't even read your "sources" since the one I randomly picked, the 2nd one, has the conclusion "Bioavailability and the efficiency of transfer of the ingested POPs across trophic levels are not known and the potential damage posed by these to the marine ecosystem has yet to be quantified and modelled."

It basically says the harm is unknown.

Rest assured I am aware of the conclusion of each, just as I am aware of which ones are the best choices to nitpick.

"Destroying". So clearly your position is based on studies. Why would you just share search results and not the studies that prove microplastics are "destroying" ecosystems.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reproductive-prob...

Probably not a huge problem based on the fact that I don't like thinking about it.

>Meanwhile, the total fertility rate worldwide has dropped by nearly 1 percent per year from 1960 to 2018.

That can't possibly be also due to demographic changes[1]? Fertility in the west started to drop way before the invention of PFAS compounds, and the worldwide rate dropping can easily be explained by the rest of the world experiencing the same demographic transition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

Do the demographic changes also explain plummeting sperm count?

We don't need to be looking for a singular answer here. Yes there are obviously demographic, cultural, and economic components. But we also know that PFAS are hormone-disrupting and they're all over our food, water, and material supply.

About that... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34830936

tl;dr the data does show a vague decline, but it's also very noisy so it's hard to know whether it's really happening. Also, it's not clear that "plummeting" sperm count would lead to "plummeting" fertility. A 50% drop in sperm count doesn't equate to a 50% drop in fertility, as long as there's "enough" sperm. So far even with the drop it looks like there's "enough".

> Of course it can possibly, and almost certainly is at least in part, caused by demographic changes.

From the GP:

>With all the inconclusive studies it compels me to believe that even if it's harmful, it's no so harmful.

The claim that isn't that there's zero harm from PFAS, it's that the harm is negligible. However, the article you linked seems to suggest that PFAS is single handledly cutting the world fertility rate by half.

Looking at those two pieces of information alone, it’s naive to say “well we haven’t conclusively drawn a causal population-scale link between cause and effect.” It is incredibly difficult to eliminate all confounders at that scale and time horizon, which would be really dooming to the hypothesis if we didn’t already have separate knowledge of the mechanics.

The Bayesian priors are: PFAS are poisonous to humans (known). PFAS are everywhere in our environment (known). We are seeing population-scale effects similar to what you’d expect to see from population-scale PFAS poisoning (noisy).

The difficulty of finding sound causal links at generational, population scales cannot prevent us from taking action on things — again — we already know are poisonous to people and to which people are frequently exposed.

It's a leap in logic to go from "PFAS impairs reproductive health" to "PFAS is a significant contributor to fertility decline". Your bayesian logic does not make sense. We know of dozens of other factors that are also casually known to lower fertility, and are pervasive in our society/environment. They can be contributors, but they can't all be significant contributors.

Again, repeating my prior comment: I'm not claiming PFAS generate zero effects on fertility. I claiming that there isn't good evidence that it's a significant factor in fertility decline.

Makes a lot of sense!

Note, this doesn't necessarily mean that we should do nothing about PFAS. We just have to be honest about the potential impacts. In other words, instead of gesturing that PFAS is the primary cause for fertility decline in the past few decades (like the linked scientific american article), you admit that the impact is unclear/low, but we should still work to remove it just in case.

Because it's the best available theory and even if it's wrong we're eliminating known toxins from our environment?

What other theories have an established mechanism of action and established population-scale exposure? That's why this one should be prioritized above others (at least any that I'm aware of?). Which other theory has these?

- lab equipment since they’re extremely non reactive

- semiconductor manufacturing for the same reason as above

- coatings inside engines/hot, high wear areas, far prolonging their lives

- rubber seals preventing chemical leaks (oil, gas, antifreeze, etc)

… the list goes on. Yeah they’re a non stick coating for pans but they’re also used in an incredible number of other places.

Like what? I don't think you can turn PEEK or UHWMPE into a rubber like substance...

As it is, if you buy a “ceramic” pan, you get some teflon knockoff instead of Le Creuset style stuff.

That'd be a hard sell though since it seems like part of the issue was manufacturers burying research and denying any knowledge of problems while selling these chemicals as a miracle cure of sorts

These chemicals were put into basically everything, like asbestos was. Cleaning products, spray grease, fabrics, paper, shampoo and cosmetics, stain-resistant coatings.

https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/chemical/pfas.htm

Say you have an API that lets you bulk fetch an Item (`getItems(Collection<UUID> itemIds, int pageNumber, int pageSize)`), but the API enforces pagination and also requires authentication. A Client could require instantiation with whatever is required for authentication (`ic = new ItemClient(authToken)`), and provide a method to retrieve a huge list of Items without worrying about pagination (`ic.getItems(itemIds)`).

I'm convinced that a significant amount of the rising LGBT identification in the youth is partly due to increasingly large amounts of Endocrine diruptors found in everything. We really should not have been so hard on the "they're turning the frogs gay" researcher just because American Conservatives picked it up and did shitty things with it. Atrazine really is a strong endocrine disruptor.

1. We still don't know why people are LGBT.

2. If everyone is feminized then there should be a clear decline in lesbians, transmen and bisexuality in women.

Are there hormone disruption sue to pfas? Yes 100%.

Does that make people gay probably not.

[0] Colon I, Caro D, Bourdony CJ, Rosario O: Identification of phthalate esters in the serum of young Puerto Rican girls with premature breast development. Environ Health Perspect, 2000; 108: 895–900

The probably not is in reference to PFAS making people LGBT not to people being feminized.

Thanks for the very basic explanation of endocrinology, unfortunately it does not support the OPs claim, you're at worst arguing with an invisible post or at best, stating something that doesn't disprove anything in my claim.

And I'll reiterate the claim is not that PFAS does not feminized people, the claim is that if we were to see it affecting our sexuality, SPECIFICALLY making us move from being straight to LGBT then we should see be able to see clear data showcasing how females produce more testosterone & having more male-align brains which would make them more likely to become Lesbian, Trans or Bisexual against control - which to my knowledge no study have shown.

>This is also why soy products may increase breast size in men but not in women

If you mean breast size as in they work out and get bigger muscles in the chest area because of protein that came from soy-based products, then yes I agree.

If you're making the argument that it increases estrogen because soy contains "plant estrogen" then no afaik you're wrong.[1][2]

[1]https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(09)00966-2/pdf

[2]https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(10)00368-7/pdf

Breast growth, erectile dysfunction and decreased libido in a 60-year-old male who drank about six pints of soy milk per day. With no other cause indicated. His symptoms ceased after he stopped consuming all this soy.

As they could not determine his testosterone levels before he started to ingest soy milk, it's impossible to know if the man was already suffering from low testosterone.

And in my sources they have studies that specifically look into people that are 60+ and there was no such link found.

So it seems the question hasn't been conclusively answered. But the case study hints at the possibility of an excessively high intake of soy having an estrogenizing effect, even if we don't know why. Maybe he had some particular configuration of gut bacteria that helped this process along, or something. More research needed.

And again even if we take your source at face value it's a 60 year old man (which mean less testosterone production) who consumed an absurd amount not something most people will consume.

Hello? Sagan called and wants to know which specific literature has convinced to hold these beliefs.

I'm pretty sure my father wasn't turned gay by PFAS and other forever chemicals (which weren't even in widespread use when he was born), it's that he grew up in an area and an era where coming out as gay could get you murdered (if you were merely ostracized, you got off easy), and it wasn't until societal attitudes had shifted that he felt safe enough to leave my mother and be with who he wanted to.

If I had to worry about that, I (a lesbian) would probably still be in the closet, too. And I probably would have married a man to deflect suspicions, much the same way my mother was a beard to my father.

The explanation given above (increased acceptance, decreased violence/killing) seems more likely than the initial explanation for increased LGBT presence

But you are of course free to present whatever studies you wish

https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/chemical/pfas.htm

Have they really been phased out in food packaging (say, in Europe)?

I thought PFAS is what is used to give grease and water resistance to food packaging (boxes, wrappers, bags, cups, etc).

If so, what have they been replaced with?

Historically they were replaced with other, poorly understood, but similarly bad materials.

For instance, PFAS replaced PFOA’s, and now they are considering replacing PFAS with PFAS [not a typo]:

https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t...

Not the same. Really not the same, overwhelmingly not the same.

And once that 10 billion is divided up between all the victims, it will hardly be worth anything at all to them either. So many victims, so much harm, it's barely a drop in the bucket.

> Some of the evidence comes from animal studies: studies have claimed that exposing rats and mice to the chemicals has negative effects on their ability to reproduce. The problem—aside from the inherent problem with comparing non-human animals to human ones—is that the concentrations of the chemicals are normally far, far higher in the animal studies than they are for humans in everyday life. As with all “toxins”, the dose makes the poison: something that is harmful to health at high levels could be entirely safe if the average person never has very much of it in their system.

> The Guardian – which has published dozens of articles about these “dangerous”, “potentially toxic” chemicals in the last few years – called the new research “the first known study on the effects of PFAS on female fertility”. That’s a little odd, since earlier this year a review study put together 13 previous such studies, drawing the conclusion that “increased levels of PFAS exposure are associated with reduced fertility in women”.

> As with all such reviews, that conclusion is dependent on the quality and consistency of the underlying 13 studies. Unfortunately, the studies we have are all over the place: even though on average they point to an association of PFAS with lower fertility, the estimate of the size of the association varies a great deal from study to study.

[1]: https://inews.co.uk/news/forever-chemicals-fertility-study-l...

Extraordinarily claims require extraordinary evidence.

In the end if your body could get rid of X, X generally isn't a problem. Sometimes it's chemical (i.e. lead/carbonmonoxide/etc) sometimes it's physical (i.e. asbestos/microplastics), accumulating enough of anything not meant to be processed/disposed in your body will be a problem.

> In 1961, company lab tests linked C8 exposure to enlarged livers in rats and rabbits. DuPont scientists then conducted tests on humans, asking a group of volunteers to smoke cigarettes laced with C8. “Nine out of 10 people in the highest-dosed group were noticeably ill for an average of nine hours with flu-like symptoms that included chills, backache, fever and coughing,” the researchers noted. “Concerns about the potential toxicity of C8 had been raised internally within DuPont by at least 1954, leading DuPont’s own researchers to conclude by at least 1961 that C8 was toxic and, according to DuPont’s own Toxicology Section Chief, should be ‘handled with extreme care,'” Bartlett’s February 2013 suit against DuPont alleged.

> In one study, for instance, Olsen looked at blood tests of 3M employees at the company’s plants in Antwerp, Belgium, and Decatur, Alabama, both of which made PFOA and PFOS, among other products. By the late 1990s when Olsen was embarking on this research, these chemicals were known within the company to accumulate in humans and alter cholesterol levels in lab animals. Because the workers had undergone three separate rounds of blood tests, Olsen was able to trace the levels of the chemicals in workers’ blood over time. And by combining his results with various clinical measures the company had been tracking in its workers, he was able to see whether there was a relationship between the chemical and these health outcomes. 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.

They've also taken some... drastic measures regarding which factory workers are allowed to be exposed to certain PFAS despite publicly denying any connection with birth defects[3]:

> In a November 1982 memo, DuPont's chief medical director, Dr. Bruce Karrh, expressed concern over employee exposure to C8. The company then barred women of child-bearing age from working around C8.

Far be it from me to condemn an abundance of caution, but the timing seems odd when you consider what happened a year prior[3]:

> When Bailey returned to work in 1981, she discovered a memo on a bench in the women's locker room. It detailed a study by 3M, which sold C8 to DuPont, that detailed eye deformities in lab animals whose mothers were fed C8 during pregnancy. Bailey went to the plant's medical doctor and asked if this is what happened to [her child born with an eye deformity]. The doctor denied a connection, according to Bailey, but arranged an appointment at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore.

[1]: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p... [2]: https://www.ecowatch.com/teflons-toxic-legacy-dupont-knew-fo... [3]: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2016/04/02/c8-susp...

This is definitely not my area, but ... was this a good experiment to do? I don't just mean from an ethical standpoint (though that seems super sketch), but purely as an experiment to understand how this chemical impacts the human body, this seems not great?

(a) if you smoke a cigarette, isn't the actual dose of C8 taken in by each subject likely to be both variable and hard to measure? Different subject would have just exhaled vs absorbed different amounts of C8, right? So it seems like you get a less precise dosing than most other means of getting it into the body?

(b) couldn't this have been toxic in the lungs in a way which wouldn't have been relevant to other/more typical means of exposure? Does reacting badly to something inhaled as smoke really imply anything about the impact of touching or ingesting it? I'm pretty sure e.g. that cayenne smoke would cause you problems that touching or eating that same substance would not cause.

(1) who benefits financially?

(2) who benefits politically from the finances & who’s potentially at legal risk?

(3) who’s career is advanced / harmed?

Ultimately, with this topic (as with many others), there are no neutral observers. There are multiple camps competing for influence - which these studies benefit.

Recall doctors and studies were supporting tobacco and cocaine as good for you. They even had doctors / PhDs advertising and publishing it as such. Many argue the same with climate change (lots of political & financial interest), Covid, etc.

Study of PFAs have a similar challenge because it was heavily & widely used. Similar to DDT, it takes time for these things to roll through and change. PFAs are generally understood to be toxic & lead to endocrine disruption. Most of the papers I’ve read conclude as much

In the mean time, "the water in my district has an extra chemical in it, which doesn't need to exist in any amount, and no one's sure whether or not it's dangerous at this concentration" seems like it's already a form of damage. No one wants to drink it, the land is less valuable, etc etc. Similarly, if sewage contaminated your water, you'd be rightly upset even if that particular sewage doesn't cause a cholera outbreak.

There is a lot of money that is interested in making PFAS look not bad (for very obvious reasons if someone gets sued $10B) so its not unreasonable to assume they would pay people to post disinformation on hacker news.

"If I stop punching you in the face, you'll have much less facial trauma - that's a win for you"

The Soviets at least had the decency to send some people to the gulag.

First people on the train would be the victims that made the fuss.

From TFA, a big reason for the high concentrations in waterways is due to firefighter training exercises. Did 3M have any oversight into how much firefighting foam firefighters dump into the waterways with their training exercises? Seems like culpability is more with the user of the product than the producer of the product.

I'm astonished how easily the narrative is shifted to blaming the little guy. Is a customer expected to re-verify the toxicity of the products they buy and set up their own recycling system?

Honestly hard to imagine the many comments here spreading doubt on the well-established dangers of pfas and arguing how innocent 3m is are disinterested comments.

Now I admit this isn't a perfect analogy, but I definitely don't think it's on the other end of the spectrum from this case (where 3M is getting 100% of the blame).

what kind of dumb analogy is this.

imagine if you sold utensils made of a new material you invested that was 100% compostable. and you tested it and observed it was toxic to rats. but it didn’t seem to kill humans at first glance. so you sold it to restaurants to use as a better alternative to plastic utensils. but over time they are toxic.

now replace utensils with pots, and the material with teflon/teflon precursors (ptfe/pfoa) and you now you have reality.

Today, in 2023, General Motors has a market cap of $55B with $156B revenue in 2022; DuPont, $32B market cap, $13B revenue 2022; ExxonMobil $417B market cap, $413B revenue 2022.

These planetary-scale terrorists are killing you, your children, and any possible future for a few trillions, and you have been conditioned to sustain, maintain, defend, extend this criminal system.

These world-destroyers thinly masked as "companies" should have been dissolved literally 100 years ago. But in the words of the contemporary ponderer, George W. Bush, after receiving "$1.5 million from the oil industry for his 2000 presidential campaign, at the time, the largest donation from the industry to a single political candidate" [3], and asked by Manmohan Singh, India's Prime Minister, why must ExxonMobil approve India's largest state-owned oil company to buy into the Sakhalin-1 energy project in Russia and "why don't you just tell them [Exxon] what to do?" Bush replied: "Nobody tells those guys what to do."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Leaded_gaso...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64241994

[3] https://www.desmog.com/2015/04/21/george-w-bush-elected-pres...

Now let's get on prison sentencing as well, so that individuals feel concerned.

Union Carbide did I think? I'm off to google it later.

And that Korean Shopping Center that collapsed.

Corporations MUST admit liability if they actually are liable. I get that they could face a barrage of legitimate and fiscally damaging claims if they admit liability...but that's the name of the game. I'm tired of the "we're not technically liable" bullshit. You, the corporation, knowingly created a product that you know contained harmful chemicals, and didn't disclose it. Now that it's been proven that 1. you knew they were harmful, and 2. you sold it anyway, you give up all claims to limited liability. It's just mind-bogglingly dumb to claim that you're not liable. Of course you are.

I run a small business that serves an edible product. If a consumer gets sick and my product is 100% provably the culprit, I don't get to say "we're not liable" in court and dictate the terms of the settlement. If the settlement is too high, I'm out of business and ethically speaking, I'm still on the hook for damages. Why do corporations not get the same treatment?

The thing speculated in the video is the industrial emitter focused on in the video (Tribar) is depended on by the automotive industry (Ford, Chrysler) which would cause factories to pause (job loss, etc.) and such if immediately shut down.

These kind of statements always crack me up, like "oh, really, so you just decided to give away X millions/billions of dollars out of the goodness of your hearts?". Would love to see some kind of policy that ends this kind of absurd post-settlement spinning.

It's almost always part of the settlement, because it limits future liability on the matter.

Yet news sources always report it as though it's something the company voluntarily says.

Saying it's silly is like an architect saying that gravity is silly.

Yes, but... it's the system you're operating in.

Laws can be silly.

Instead, people are offered a one time payment to basically drop the case. I think a lot are happy to take it because it means they don't have to fight a tedious legal battle.