[HN Gopher] New PFAS discovered with novel testing method
___________________________________________________________________
New PFAS discovered with novel testing method
Author : adomasm3
Score : 151 points
Date : 2023-12-18 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (research.unc.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (research.unc.edu)
| ars wrote:
| I went in expecting them to just use Florine as a proxy for PFAS
| (which is commonly and incorrectly done) and was pleased to see
| some real science with actual compounds identified.
| s0rce wrote:
| Is that done? I mostly see these measured by LCMS.
| bhouston wrote:
| How safe are these? It is cool science, but so far PFAS seem to
| be poisoning us. Are some PFAS considered safe? Or as a class are
| they all harmful?
|
| Details: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-
| human-hea...
| pardoned_turkey wrote:
| The substantive claim against PFAS is that they're very
| persistent in the environment, can bioaccumulate, and end up in
| places we didn't anticipate (e.g., in the rain). This is a good
| argument for scaling back.
|
| Separately from this, there's some science to suggest that PFAS
| are harmful to humans, but at doses very much higher than
| experienced by the general population. Many of the headlines
| about PFAS being detected in weird places involve _parts per
| trillion_ , and at that level, no health impacts have been
| demonstrated. Even for lead and ethylmercury in water, the
| norms are in parts per billion.
|
| Then, there's a cottage industry of anti-progress doomsayers
| who want to equate it to a handful of big environmental
| missteps of the past, so the lines get blurred. Same as with
| microplastics, where you're bombarded with headlines about them
| being found in random places and being vaguely bad for you.
| adomasm3 wrote:
| great summary! I wrote a blog post focusing on DWR clothing,
| but ended up covering PFAS human and animal studies and
| concentration sampling. Overall with very similar
| conclusions:
| https://open.substack.com/pub/molecularspec/p/water-
| repellen...
|
| However, if we are able to better detect them, we can build
| better remediation which we need.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think many people would rather get upset about some
| miniscule detection in a random place than take a hard look
| at their own home where their highest exposure is.
| wredue wrote:
| I mean, we've understood negative impacts of climate change
| for like a hundred years now, and minimizer propaganda is
| _still_ winning the information war for a majority of the
| planet, and some 40% of Americans.
|
| I don't think there's any issue at all with getting ahead of
| forever chemicals and regulating them before it gets to
| climate change levels of disaster (in some deregulation parts
| of the country, it will soon be legal to contaminate the soil
| and groundwater with pfas and radioactive materials because
| some politicians friend wants to sell their companies waste
| to road work).
|
| I am sorry, but I simply disagree that the issue is minimal
| here. We should be treating this as if it's already out of
| control and stamping it out before propaganda pieces settle
| and let it become out of control.
| armada651 wrote:
| > and at that level, no health impacts have been
| demonstrated.
|
| Right, but since it bio-accumulates even if your exposure is
| low over the decades you may accumulate enough of it for it
| to affect your health. If your body can't get rid of it then
| it's not the dosage that counts anymore, it's the total
| exposure over your lifetime that matters.
| csmpltn wrote:
| Your argument about "total exposure over a lifetime" can be
| applied to literally every single thing people ingest or
| do.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| No, only things that bioaccumulate...
| morelisp wrote:
| No, we shit, piss, and/or otherwise emit most things back
| out. Chemicals which genuinely bioaccumulate are
| naturally rare and we should be careful with them.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Can be, but the ones that we know are harmful, like lead,
| have or are being removed from the cycle. I'm sure you're
| doing a logical fallacy of sorts here, appeal to
| tradition or something - just because it happens with
| something else, doesn't make it right.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Hi! I'm Clippy. It looks like you are trying to make a
| point. Maybe I can help?
|
| Because you definitely need it if you thought your
| comment did anything.
| readams wrote:
| If they were measuring dangerous levels of bioaccumulation
| then you can be sure we'd hear about it. You'd need to live
| 1000 years though given the levels we're talking about.
| morelisp wrote:
| There's lots of evidence that long-chain PFAS can
| bioaccumulate across generations. You don't need to live
| a millennium personally. (Also the effects are
| disproportionately bad on infants, so you don't need 1000
| years of generations either.)
|
| Also we didn't really stop putting them in the water
| yet...
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Or you just need to be a fetus.
|
| Yes, did you know, fetuses start as single cells?
| npunt wrote:
| This is not self-evident. Biology is extremely complex
| and we have a lot left to learn before we can make
| definitive statements about safety. This idea of 'you can
| be sure we'd hear about it' places too much of the burden
| on journalists, random medical researchers, and
| eventually regulators to suss out what is going on.
|
| As it stands in our system today any awareness we may
| have about dangers will come far after the danger to us,
| and then we'll all say a collective 'oops' as we've had
| to do the last hundred times. Look no further than all
| the 'I [live near the plant/play on the field/drink the
| water] and have [cancer/autoimmune/rare disease/etc]'
| stories that keep coming out year after year.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| > you can be sure we'd hear from it
|
| If it's widely used and profitable to many, you can be
| sure you won't hear from it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias
| colechristensen wrote:
| >Same as with microplastics, where you're bombarded with
| headlines about them being found in random places and being
| vaguely bad for you.
|
| Compounds in plastics mimic hormones putting everyone (and
| the whole biosphere) on low grade hormone replacement.
| There's not a question about "if", but "how much". They are
| biologically active, they are present inside you.
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| As someone who lived in a place that's still dealing with
| pfoa contamination, your characterization of "anti-progress
| doomsayers" feels insensitive. If you tell people that they
| and their kids have toxic chemicals in their blood at 100x
| the normal concentration they're going to be concerned.
| Writing them off as outliers is dismissive and misses the
| point; it doesn't matter if things are safe in small doses if
| companies can't be trusted to avoid exposing people to unsafe
| doses.
|
| From a 2016 study in Vermont:
|
| > More than 400 wells tested positive for PFOA. More than 300
| wells had concentrations at levels greater than the state's
| PFOA/PFOS drinking water standard of 20 parts per trillion
| (ppt). The maximum level of PFOA detected in a private
| drinking water well was 4,600 ppt.
|
| https://dec.vermont.gov/sites/dec/files/documents/PFAS%20Sam.
| ..
| connicpu wrote:
| The problem with PFAS isn't the amount found in the general
| environment, it's the amount found in the immediate area
| around factories that produce them or apply them to products.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Parts per trillion are small, but can still be bad for you.
| And this is an area of active study, the old threshold of 70
| ppt was dropped a thousandfold recently:
|
| https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/stricter-
| federal-...
|
| The Wolverine shoe leather tannery up the road dumped their
| ScotchGuard contaminated scraps/waste in the swamps behind a
| farm owned by a family friend back in the 70s and 80s. Now my
| well water is contaminated with a few parts per trillion of
| PFAS, and the PFAS levels in my blood are significantly
| higher than the threshold of proven harm.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| How were you able to get a blood test?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Checknthrowup238's response elsewhere for a great response.
| You seem to recognize the properties of PFAS but wave away
| the risk over time.
|
| Like asbestos, we should shelve this substance, even if it's
| good at what it does.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Unless I misunderstood the article, the UNC researchers
| developed a way to detect more PFAS in the water. They didn't
| develop new PFAS.
| joenathanone wrote:
| Good video on the topic here
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8qGtEVh7oQ
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Are some PFAS considered safe? Or as a class are they all
| harmful?_
|
| I don't think many chemists want to admit that there's very
| little reason to believe any PFAS formulation could ever really
| be safe. Perhaps one could be designed to break down faster and
| be less bioaccumulating in animals but realistically their
| mechanism of action as surfactants - the reason they're so
| industrially useful - is the very reason they're toxic to
| living organisms.
|
| Surfactants fundamentally change the surface tension of water
| and other fluids which has an effect on everything from how
| biological surfaces adhere to each other (including to the
| internal extracellular matrix that most multicellular life
| depends on to organize its cells) to how proteins fold
| together. Normally surfactants like soap, lecithin in egg
| yolks, and glycolipids are not a problem because they're
| immediately biodegradable but not PFAS.
|
| The carbon-flourine bonds that make them so resistant to
| breakdown and so bioaccumulating are the reason why they work
| in such a wide range of industrial environments, surviving high
| temperature and strong redox reagents that would normally rip
| apart any other molecule. It's the worst kind of catch 22. The
| whole class should be banned and the industry forced to live
| with the consequences like all the anti-fouling agents that are
| banned in the maritime industry.
| TSiege wrote:
| This was a great simple, explanation of the reason for the
| harm and why small amounts matter. Thank you
| mrob wrote:
| This applies only to small molecule PFAS, not PFAS polymers,
| which are about as inert as you can get. You need the small
| molecules to make the polymers, but there's no reason you
| need to release them into the environment. Strong regulation
| (e.g. Chinese style, with lengthy prison sentences or death
| penalty for CEOs of companies violating them) could enforce
| strict containment of the reactions and safe disposal of the
| waste with techniques such as supercritical water oxidation.
|
| This would increase the cost, but there's no good substitute
| for PFAS polymers, so people who really needed them would be
| willing to pay.
| whycome wrote:
| Unrelated to the content:
|
| The chemists are from UNC and the article writer from NC State
| University. Is it common to just use just "Carolina" when
| referring to locals instead of "North Carolina" (to differentiate
| from the South)?
| woodruffw wrote:
| I've spent a decent amount of time in NC (and a little bit of
| time in SC), and I've never heard of "Carolina" as a generic
| term for just NC. The closest I've heard is "the Carolinas" for
| both NC and SC.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Used that way Carolina refers to UNC chapel hill, not north
| carolina the state. It's an extremely common local usage when
| talking about the university sports teams. It's less
| pervasive but still very common for referring to the
| university itself.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| cultural counterpoint:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_in_My_Mind
| umanwizard wrote:
| There is also the Carolina Panthers.
| patwolf wrote:
| In the case of the Panthers "Carolina" refers to both
| states, which is why the logo is the combined outline of
| North Carolina and South Carolina.
|
| Seems like a smart way to lay a claim to a bigger market
| rather than being tied to a specific city or state.
| samch wrote:
| Carolina, in this case, refers to the name of the institution.
| This is likely based on its history. UNC-Chapel Hill used to be
| the only public institution of higher education in the
| southeastern US. Over time, UNC evolved to become the name of
| the system of schools that includes UNC-CH, NCSU, and 15 other
| campuses.
|
| To this day, however, UNC-CH is still often referred to as
| Carolina, UNC, Chapel Hill, or - for athletics - the Tar Heels.
| whycome wrote:
| Thanks for this. I went through the article again and it
| doesn't even hint at that usage. I suppose it's a bit like
| "America" coming to mean just one country.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| to be clear, the connection is more than colloquial. NCSU and
| the others you mention are formally "constituent
| institutions" under "the UNC system" (although this comes as
| a surprise to most NCSU students).
|
| https://catalog.unc.edu/about/unc-system/
| skrbjc wrote:
| Kinda like how UC-Berkeley refers to itself as "California"
| or just "Cal"
| quartz wrote:
| I grew up in Chapel Hill and yes UNC Chapel Hill refers to
| itself as "Carolina" (in sports [1], research [2], and name
| [3]).
|
| It's less commonly recognized outside the state... I live in
| NYC now and often have to catch myself when I say something
| like "I'm headed back to visit a friend at Carolina" since it
| almost always results in "oh? which one?"
|
| [1] https://shop.goheels.com/mens-fanatics-branded-black-
| north-c...
|
| [2] https://research.unc.edu/?s=Carolina
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kwi4dIT-jIY
| vGPU wrote:
| > Researchers collaborating with Baker's lab collected samples
| from North Carolina's Cape Fear River in 2016. Using this new
| detection method, they tested the samples and found 47 different
| PFAS. Of those, 11 had not been previously detected in the river,
| and eight had not been detected anywhere outside of a lab.
|
| Chemours, a renamed DuPont factory, has been caught dumping PFAS
| into the river before. Funnily enough, it was spun off partially
| in order to assume liabilities against DuPont from the various
| lawsuits they had against them for very similar reasons.
|
| There are also multiple superfund sites along the river.
| Pollution has been an issue for decades and yet nothing ever
| really seems to change.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > yet nothing ever really seems to change.
|
| That's not an accident.
|
| > To avoid responsibility for what many experts believe is a
| public health crisis, leading chemical companies like Chemours,
| DuPont and 3M have deployed a potent mix of tactics.
|
| > They have used public charm offensives to persuade regulators
| and lawmakers to back off. They have engineered complex
| corporate transactions to shield themselves from legal
| liability. And they have rolled out a conveyor belt of scantly
| tested substitute chemicals that sometimes turn out to be just
| as dangerous as their predecessors.
|
| - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/business/chemours-
| dupont-...
| seper8 wrote:
| eight other ways to give people cancer, yay
| rdudek wrote:
| Well, that is interesting to detect new PFAS chemicals in water.
| Then, we get this this neat tidbit: "The Environmental Protection
| Agency (EPA) keeps a list of more than 14,000 known or potential
| per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)."
|
| Why do we need 14,000+ different PFAS substances? I honestly did
| not know there was this many out there.
| whatever1 wrote:
| When we do chemical reactions (specially organic) we always
| have some by products
| cyanydeez wrote:
| One word: Patents
| kacy wrote:
| I grew up in a poor town that sourced water from the Cape Fear
| river. There were two major factories in our immediate area: one
| that made paper and the other made industrial chemicals. The
| Dupont plant mentioned in the article was 10 miles upstream from
| where we were. We knew it was better to buy bottled water than to
| drink what came through the pipes. Grateful for the scientists
| and journalists for their work exposing all of this.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Just remember: When you buy bottled water, you don't really
| know where it comes from, and what contaminants are in it.
|
| Don't assume that bottled water is any safer (or more
| dangerous) than your tap. After all, when you look at the fine
| print of cheaper bottled waters, you'll often see something
| like "Sourced from the XXX municipal water supply."
|
| I also remember staying at the Poland Springs resort and
| observing that they had septic tanks a 10 minute walk away from
| the "shrine" to the original "Poland Spring," and finding trash
| in the woods that had been there for years.
| happytiger wrote:
| Good point. What happened to feduciary-style responsibilities
| for executives in their duties to _customers_?
|
| Let me give you the data to back it up:
|
| https://www.wpr.org/dnr-says-bottled-water-companies-
| arent-r....
|
| One 2021 study found PFAS in 39 out of 101 bottled water
| products that ranged in levels from almost zero to nearly 19
| parts per trillion. David Strifling is director of the Water
| Law and Policy Initiative at Marquette University Law School.
| He said there's no general assurance that bottled water is
| safer than tap water.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Or even to their non-customer stakeholders!
|
| The meme that corporations exist exclusively for the
| benefit of shareholders is a very recent, very extreme
| phenomenon, yielding exactly the sort of results you would
| expect. Externalizing costs, especially in ways that are
| dispersed enough not to be addressable by any particular
| affected party, is _the whole point_ of the modern
| enterprise. It wasn't always this way and it need not be
| this way in the future.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Most municipal water supplies are safer than the piping
| systems or the private wells.
|
| In sheer probability, your 'dont do X' is really a minority
| outlier and doesn't help anyone.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| I find your comment offensive: "don't SUPPOSE x" is very
| different of "dont DO x" as it's just a paraphrase of "x is
| a misconception".
|
| Furthermore he may be a minority (or not, all we know is
| you both have a different social circle) but that just make
| him someone with originals idea so let's listen instead of
| blaming (please).
| oooyay wrote:
| > Most municipal water supplies are safer than the piping
| systems or the private wells.
|
| I used to work in municipal water software and I don't
| think this statement can be said broadly. It helps to
| segregate discussion of water into segments:
|
| - Water extraction and storage health
|
| - Water mainline delivery health
|
| - Water lateral/service line health
|
| Extraction and storage are usually pretty good across the
| board. Mainline can vary and lateral/service line varies
| _highly_ in quality.
|
| Mainline health usually comes down to maintaining pressure
| and flow, especially at the end of a service area. In some
| cities you'll see them dump water from the hydrant, other
| cities don't have such good hygiene (and stagnant water is
| dangerous). Service lines have historically been considered
| on the owner to deal with; there's now federal funding to
| fight things line lead service lines (of which there are
| still huge amounts). Service lines _do_ impact overall
| water health though, as not every water meter or mainline
| connection has backflow prevention.
| frandroid wrote:
| Okay but if I was living downstream from these plants, I'd
| still take my chances on bottled water that's coming from
| elsewhere. :P
| emodendroket wrote:
| Sure. But if you know for a fact that your tap water is
| contaminated it's logical to buy water from elsewhere. Maybe
| look for ones that have been filtered with RO.
| robk wrote:
| Still makes me uncomfortable even using the shower when I'm
| down in Shallotte for the same reason!
| agtech_andy wrote:
| What will become clear over the next 5 years is the extent to
| which the worldwide environment is polluted with PFAS.
|
| Given how much PFAS has been found in remote corners of the
| world, I think it is safe to assume that most of the world has
| been touched by PFAS. Everywhere humans try to find PFAS, we find
| it. The reason we hear about it so often now is that we are
| checking for it everywhere. And like the article describes, there
| are new PFAS being discovered all the time.
|
| This is a generational issue.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| It's actually fascinating just how much power private business
| has to keep their chemical lists private _now_, in the _past_
| and concievably in the future.
|
| The fact that we can't just ask them "what were you chemically
| making 20 years ago" is really an absurd blackhole in
| regulatory frameworks.
|
| Basically, even the leading edge regulatory frameworks tackling
| PFAS are doing so _after it's polluted things_ and has _no
| idea_ what they're associated with, other than large scale
| manufacturing, 3M, etc.
|
| On the one hand, it's easy to understand since manufaturing has
| so many different components, but a sheer "there's clearly
| chemists somewhere, making this shit up and detailing what
| they're doing" issue, it's pathetic.
| wddkcs wrote:
| It's not pathetic, it's a collection issue. Estimate the cost
| of setting up that regulatory framework, and the cost of that
| reporting on the businesses themselves, and you'll quickly
| understand why it hasn't been done. Even the cost of
| estimating, is itself a cost. Without proper awareness of the
| issue and incentive to fix, a lack of that information isn't
| anything other than a natural consequence of reality.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > Without proper awareness of the issue and incentive to
| fix
|
| They were aware, and the incentive to fix was there. There
| have been consistent and sustained attempt to cover up
| these issues for _decades_ , because of _sheer greed_.
| hanniabu wrote:
| No wonder cancer is on the rise
| userbinator wrote:
| The fact that PFAS are everywhere and have been for decades is
| IMHO itself evidence that they aren't actually as big of a
| problem as some want to believe.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Global_...
|
| _Most industrialized nations have average PFOA blood serum
| levels ranging from 2 to 8 parts per billion;[57] the highest
| consumer sub-population identified was in Korea--with about 60
| parts per billion.[52] In Peru,[58] Vietnam,[59] and
| Afghanistan[60] blood serum levels have been recorded to be below
| one part per billion. In 2003-2004 99.7% of Americans had
| detectable PFOA in their serum with an average of about 4 parts
| per billion_
|
| I know correlation is not causation, but look up the
| corresponding other statistics about those countries' population
| health such as life expectancy, and that data seems to suggest
| the exact opposite to "PFAS are harmful".
| sigwinch28 wrote:
| From the same page:
|
| As of November 2023, the International Agency for Research on
| Cancer (IARC) has classified PFOA as carcinogenic to humans
| (Group 1) based on "sufficient" evidence for cancer in animals
| and "strong" mechanistic evidence in exposed humans.[119]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-18 23:00 UTC)