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3M’s PFAS Crisis Has Come to Europe

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Re: 3M’s PFAS Crisis Has Come to Europe

#5
>PFOS—perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—is referred to as a forever chemical, because it accumulates in soil, rivers, and drinking water and is almost impossible to get rid of. She had about 300 micrograms of it per liter in her blood, more than 60 times the level recommended as safe today by the European Union.

Almost impossible, but not impossible. It has been found that giving blood (and then throwing that blood away) significant reduces PFOS levels. Not that I'm defending 3M or any of this. My favorite rivers where I fish turned out to be full of PFOS due to a leaking 3M waste dump and this was only announced in 2021. So I spent some time looking for solutions.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

https://www.aabb.org/news-resources/news/article/2022/04/26/...

Re: 3M’s PFAS Crisis Has Come to Europe

#7
Nothing will change until there are prison sentences, and the very deliberate system of shielding managers and corporations from responsibility is changed.

It was known for decades that Asbestos and cigarettes causes lung cancer, that adding lead to gasoline is a terrible idea, that burning oil warms the atmosphere. The truth was suppressed through intimidation, lawsuits and bribes. Regulatory agencies are corrupted by the revolving door system. You cannot trust these organisations.

Re: 3M’s PFAS Crisis Has Come to Europe

#8

Nothing will change until there are prison sentences, and the very deliberate system of shielding managers and corporations from responsibility is changed. It was known for decades that Asbestos and cigarettes causes lung cancer, that adding lead to gasoline is a terrible idea, that burning oil warms the atmosphere. The truth was suppressed through intimidation, lawsuits and bribes. Regulatory agencies are corrupted…

[deleted]

Re: 3M’s PFAS Crisis Has Come to Europe

#9
After reading the series "A Chemical Hunger" by the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, I'm pretty convinced that chemical contamination is a global-warming level threat to humanity. The authors talk about the evidence that chemicals released into the environment by human activity (such as PFAS) are causing obesity, and they present compelling evidence that this is plausible. They are also working on research to confirm this hypothesis.

But regardless of whether obesity is caused primarily by environmental contamination, chemical contamination is a huge risk for a few reasons:

-Once in the environment, chemical contaminants can react in unforeseen ways, creating new chemicals that we will have no idea how to monitor for.

-Health data prior to industrialization is not good and is confounded by poor medical practices, so we may think we've "solved" chemical contamination when in fact we haven't (e.g. maybe heart disease would go away if it weren't for some chemical that we started using in 1910 but we can't tell because everyone was dying of dysentery).

-The solution, in some most cases, may mean giving up significant technological advances, especially polymers and heavy metals extracted from the ground.

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

Re: 3M’s PFAS Crisis Has Come to Europe

#10
post #5

>PFOS—perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—is referred to as a forever chemical, because it accumulates in soil, rivers, and drinking water and is almost impossible to get rid of. She had about 300 micrograms of it per liter in her blood, more than 60 times the level recommended as safe today by the European Union. Almost impossible, but not impossible. It has been found that giving blood (and then throwing that blood away)…

Are you recommending bloodletting as a cure for some of the nastiest pollution ever created by humans?

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

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