U.S. drinking water widely contaminated with 'forever chemicals': report

What happens is someone will point to anyone of these chems and say "that level is safe." Perhaps. But no one has an understanding of them and what happens when you combine trace amounts of Chem X, Chem Y and Med Z. At that point any judgement of safety breakdowns.

Here is more detailed report on this problem in Europe [1] They seem to indicate levels many times higher are present in Europe than the EPAs suggested limited of 70 PPT. Although that limit also seems to be commonly exceeded in US. It is concerning that technical discussion over regulation is occurring while the picture of actual contamination levels is very incomplete [2]

[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/human/chemicals/emerging-ch...

[2] https://greensciencepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/An...

I don't even know if most recent teflon products are supposed to be "safe" when scratched or otherwise, but I've been buying and recommending everyone to stay away from teflon products and buy only ceramic or stainless steel ones for a few years now.

I've noticed there are a lot of ceramic alternatives to teflon these days compared to a few years ago and it's not much more expensive. I do believe ceramics aren't 100% safe for certain applications either, such as boiling sour stuff, or something along those lines.

I would be interested to know what is the current trust level of the residents on the gov and EPA in the different states.

Not far from my living area a new gas rig started operating where the gov, contractor company and EPA (EPA of my country that is) argue the chemical emissions doesn't pose health risks (same for sea water pollution risk), while self-funded environmental organizations argue otherwise and show inconsistencies and omissions of real-time data in air monitoring stations. They compare the owners' claims with their assertions.

The interesting story is about trust crisis in the system. The public reached a point where they started crowd-funding independent air monitoring system to put pressure on EPA to "do its job" and enforce the standards. EPA already announced a nice mobile app showing monitored air data on the map to provide public sense of security. I hope the data is genuine.

There are more and more examples of crowd-funded projects as alternatives to governmental components expressing decline of public trust.

It seem to happen globally on many levels. Is it possible the crowd-funded organizations will one day replace the government?

Remote locations are where companies frack and spill oil and coal waste with impunity. People are also more likely to drink well water there (apparently 15% of Americans rely on it).

Coming from a rural place where water smelled like rotten eggs on a good day, I doubt the veracity of the claim.