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In this episode of Water Talk, Paul the Waterman delves into the alarming presence of PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, in our water supply. These synthetic chemicals, renowned for their resilient properties in consumer products, have surfaced as a global contamination crisis. With insights from various communities affected by PFAS, listeners are taken on a journey from the Faroe Islands to Minnesota to uncover the hidden impacts on human health and the environment. Last week’s discussion on DuPont’s involvement in the PFAS saga transitions into a hard-hitting expose on 3M and other corporations’ roles in perpetuating this environmental
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to Water Talk with Paul the Waterman brought to you by Water Pros. Paul the Waterman is Colorado’s expert on all things related to the water we use and drink in our homes. Have you ever thought about where your water actually comes from? Is it safe to drink? Is it harmful to my health, my skin, or my hair? Paul the Waterman knows water and he has the answers. So get ready to talk to the Waterman yourself right now. Call in with your questions to talk with your host, Paul the Waterman.
SPEAKER 01 :
Happy Thursday, everybody. I’m Paul the Waterman, a.k.a. Paul Dowding. How you doing? Hey, we’re going to have a great show today, and if you have questions on the material that we share with you, give us a call. We’d love to talk to you about it. You can reach us here in the studio at 303-477-5600. That’s 303-477-5600. So we’ve been doing some research on the PFAs of forever chemicals in the water. We found… Some really good information that we’re going to share with you the next couple of weeks. The PFAS contamination is global, but I didn’t realize how bad and how long the PFAS contamination has been happening. It’s dangerous. Do I think our water quality is safe? I absolutely do not, and I think you’ll share that feeling with me after the information that we share with you, especially today. So last week we talked about DuPont and what happened with them and the PFAS contamination. Today it’s 3M’s turn. And so this information that you’re hearing is a video that can be found on YouTube. um and so i encourage you um you know to do your research because you’ll see and find the same things that we’re going to be sharing with you and it’s clearly our responsibility to look at the quality of the water that we have and i think we also have to make our elected officials pay more attention to what i think is an epidemic of poor water quality and it’s global um so okay look let’s let’s let’s start it out
SPEAKER 19 :
Here we are in the Faroes, a remote community up in the North Atlantic. We have been living or fishing for hundreds of years. We have no production of chemicals, but we are exposed to a lot of chemicals. They came to us without our asking us. We have seen negative effects on the health of our children. We want to see their development because we have always been a bit suspicious if these substances can have any impact on the endocrine system. This is a price to pay for what the international society have done without thinking about the consequences of just releasing new substances.
SPEAKER 20 :
What we have seen here in the Faroes is that this is part of an absolutely global contamination that may have started in the 1960s without us being aware of it.
SPEAKER 19 :
So PFAS is everywhere.
SPEAKER 08 :
PFAS have contaminated our food supply, and PFAS can also accumulate in soils, in sediments.
SPEAKER 20 :
There are chemists who have sampled rainwater on the Antarctica and in the Himalayas. What did they find in the rainwater? PFAS. It’s all over.
SPEAKER 03 :
They don’t just stay in the environment, in our water, in our soil, but they get into living things and they stay in us. It’s like a ticking time bomb in the body as this stuff is building up and coating all of our organs and staying there year after year.
SPEAKER 20 :
We have analyzed thousands and thousands of human blood samples. We never met one that did not contain PFAS.
SPEAKER 14 :
We have all paid a high price due to large corporations carelessly dumping known toxic chemicals. Through no fault of my own, I was exposed to these toxic chemicals, and as a result, I will die with this cancer.
SPEAKER 03 :
We’ve all been used as guinea pigs for the last 70 to 80 years. We weren’t told we were being exposed, even though the companies knew that these things, if we put them into these products, they will get into people. They will get into people’s blood. But they did it anyway.
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s hard to even talk to people about these chemicals and tell them, look, there’s a chemical that’s in you that’s not found anywhere in nature. These chemicals are found in 99% of people. It just sounds crazy. Tell people that these are also forever chemicals that we’ve created a chemical that we don’t know how to destroy. It sounds even stranger.
SPEAKER 08 :
So PFAS are synthetic man-made chemicals. PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. It’s quite a mouthful. It’s an acronym that stands for a family of thousands of different chemicals. The most recent estimate from the EPA says that there are over 14,000 different chemical structures that they recognize to be PFAS. They share the same chemical property of having many carbon-fluorine bonds. These carbon-fluorine bonds are some of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry. So for this reason, PFAS have also been called forever chemicals because those carbon-fluorine bonds just really don’t break down.
SPEAKER 04 :
But the part where this story gets really strange is looking at their origins, because these chemicals came from the Manhattan Project, which was a secret project to build the atomic bomb in World War II. So after the war, companies began experimenting with these chemicals. One company had a scientist who accidentally splashed some of it on their canvas shoes. They discovered the chemicals had stain-proof and waterproof properties. That company was 3M.
SPEAKER 08 :
Because of their unique chemical properties, they’re added to products to make them non-stick, grease-proof, stain-proof, and water-resistant.
SPEAKER 18 :
You know who’s going to win this contest. Teflon is so much easier to clean than stainless steel or uncoated aluminum.
SPEAKER 04 :
These chemicals went into some of these companies’ most famous products, like 3M’s Scotchgard and DuPont’s Teflon. These chemicals were really at the dawn of what we think of as the era of better living through chemistry. And they sort of epitomized this attitude of consumers and companies that everything we do could become more convenient.
SPEAKER 21 :
…on virtually any fabric. Use Scotchgum, a fabric protector, and let your cock run its over.
SPEAKER 04 :
Consumers are still really enjoying the fruits of this era. When you look around you, there are so many things that are stain-proof or waterproof, like pizza boxes that are grease-resistant or microwave popcorn bags. They’re in industrial applications like plastics, semiconductors. They may even be used in solar panels and wind turbines. They’re in a lot of products that it’s not even clear why they’re there, like toilet paper or dental floss. But as time has gone on and more scientific research into them has progressed, we’ve realized that they also have a downside. We’re east of Minneapolis in Minnesota near 3M’s global headquarters. So back in 2018, I started looking at 3M’s history with PFAS chemicals. I wrote a story at that time. A lot has changed since then, and I’m back to see what’s happened. In 3M’s hometown in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, and in the surrounding areas of Oakdale and Lake Elmo, the company had been dumping these chemicals since the 1960s. And clearly these chemicals got out into the environment. They were seeping underground, getting into aquifers, getting into soil. And that’s really the beginning of this gigantic plume that was later documented around the 3M site in Cottage Grove. The pollution has caused concern among the people who live in the area. There are troubling statistics about childhood cancer, which is thought to be more connected to environmental contaminants.
SPEAKER 11 :
Hi. Hi, how’s it going? How are those burgers? Great. I’m a wonderful barbecuer, obviously. Do you have a plate to put them on? That probably would have been something I should have grabbed as well. Oh my gosh, mother.
SPEAKER 04 :
Back in 2018, I interviewed a number of local residents, including Amy and her daughter, Lexi. I was so happy to get back in touch with you and find out that Lexi has made a full recovery. So how many years did that take?
SPEAKER 15 :
Being done with treatment and stuff, to be fully considered cancer-free, it took five years after I was treated for it.
SPEAKER 11 :
So when did you first start suspecting that it could be an environmental issue? I drank city water growing up, so city of Oakdale water. And then when I was pregnant with Lexi, her dad and I moved into an apartment in Oakdale and lived there until she was about two or three. And all of her baby bottles were made with the water. We didn’t buy the filtered water then. I don’t think it was as common as it is now. I don’t really remember people as having bottles of water. It was more of a luxury. People didn’t want to spend money on that.
SPEAKER 04 :
I mean, do you ever think back about, like, eating fish from the lake or anything else that might have put her at higher risk?
SPEAKER 15 :
Yeah. I’ve been eating fish since, like, the day I was, like, one years old. Like, since the day I could chew, my grandpa has been having me eat fish.
SPEAKER 11 :
From the lakes around here? Yeah. So, my dad, her grandpa, he’s a professional fishing guide. Oh, wow. So, he loves the fish, and he loves to go fishing, and…
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so I want to interrupt real quick. Minnesota is the birthplace of the Mississippi River. Also, the river that went through my hometown, the Rock River in Illinois. And so these contaminants are global contamination. And I think it’s something that it’s been in all our drinking water and all our food. And one of the things that… What bothers me personally is when I was listening to that EPA webinar last year, not one time did they talk about the severity. And nor did they mention 114,000 chemicals, it’s probably grown, that make up the PFAS family. So the good news is that we can remove this. From the drinking water with a point of use for reverse osmosis drinking water system. We can also remove this within a whole house anion resin based system. And I definitely recommend that both those are supported. with a whole house water softener because hard water can absolutely wreak havoc on water filtration. Another known method to remove PFAS is activated carbon. But activated carbon doesn’t last forever. It breaks down. And quite frankly, activated carbon absorbs a whole bunch of other organics. So, you know, with this PFAS contamination, My professional and personal opinion is that we look at the more reliable and long-term reduction methods with a point of use reverse osmosis or the whole house anion resin-based system. And that’s something that can absolutely remove the PFAS. Something else to listen to is that since World War II, basically till today, PFAS are still an active part of our environment. And there’s countries, other countries that have not taken steps to, you know, cut back on the PFAS. And PFAS, you’ll find, can also be spread globally through, you know, the rainwater. So, okay, look, let’s pick it back up.
SPEAKER 11 :
Oh, wow. So he loves the fish and he loves to go fishing and come home and make big fish fries. And yeah, they live right over by here. It’s about a six minute drive from here. So all the lakes that he would go to would be Lake Montreville, Lake Jane, all the ones in Lake Elmo. My dad’s a lot more particular now if he’s going to actually keep them.
SPEAKER 04 :
Not everyone was as fortunate as Lexi. Death records show a child who died in Oakdale from 2003 to 2015 was 171% more likely to have had cancer compared to those who lived outside the contaminated area. So in that area, one of the schools was Tartan High School, and there was a math teacher there who told me the numbers just weren’t adding up. There were so many students who seemed to have rare cancers, so many teachers who had family members with cancer, and one of the most outspoken students about this was Amara Strandy.
SPEAKER 14 :
I’m 20 years old, and at the age of 15, I was diagnosed with stage four fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma. I’ve had over 20 surgeries, including two liver resections and one open chest surgery. There are no more treatments to try, no roadmap, and no plan.
SPEAKER 04 :
So is this her bedroom or just her hangout?
SPEAKER 17 :
No, this is her bedroom. This was her bedroom. The reason why there’s no bed in here is because it was a hospital bed and we had to give that back to the hospice.
SPEAKER 08 :
Who’s from hospice?
SPEAKER 17 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Amara was diagnosed with cancer at age 15 and she died just two days before her 21st birthday in April of 2023.
SPEAKER 17 :
What she’s most proud of is her music studio.
SPEAKER 04 :
Wow, how many different instruments does she have in here? I see a violin. There’s your ukulele, her mandolin.
SPEAKER 15 :
There might be a harmonica or a kazoo somewhere in there.
SPEAKER 17 :
Her first love was music. She was a composer. She had written songs. Her dream of a career was to write music, compose music for either computer games or maybe even film scores.
SPEAKER 04 :
And she could keep composing even while she was sick?
SPEAKER 17 :
She was composing up until just a few days before she died.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 17 :
But she couldn’t sing anymore.
SPEAKER 07 :
They removed this large mass that had grown into the fibers of her liver, of the fiber lamellar variety of liver cancer. Fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma is a cancer that is found in one in five million people. It’s very rare.
SPEAKER 04 :
Did any doctors along the way say they thought there might be an environmental cause for the cancer or suggest any lifestyle changes?
SPEAKER 17 :
That was not their concern. Their concern was to deal with the cancer as they understood it. It wasn’t until much later that Amara started inquiring about How possibly could this happen to her?
SPEAKER 04 :
And did she first start asking those questions at all because she was a student at Tartan and there have been so many other cancers there?
SPEAKER 07 :
Absolutely. I mean, she was aware of the community concern about PFOFs. It was something that the kids talked about at school and even joked about, you know, as much as you can joke about, you know, don’t drink the water here.
SPEAKER 17 :
Don’t drink the cancer water as they talked about it.
SPEAKER 07 :
She knew kids whose parents had cancer. And then she knew kids whose siblings had cancer. She wanted to know, why doesn’t anyone know about this? And why aren’t people asking questions?
SPEAKER 01 :
So that’s a great point. Why aren’t people asking questions? When we got the communities received letters last year regarding they were mandated by the EPA and those letters saying that the water quality didn’t meet standards for PFAS, forever chemicals, why didn’t they have more information in those letters? Why wasn’t there facts regarding the potential health hazards of drinking water with PFAS contamination? That’s something that really boggles my mind. This information that you guys can find, it’s on YouTube. I encourage you to get it. Why is the federal government not doing more? And why haven’t we put together the world’s top scientists, I’m very serious about this, to try to eradicate this PFAS problem? I mean, this is extremely serious. It’s a global contamination. So it’s not only in our water supply. It’s in the grass. It’s in the trees. It’s in the vegetables. It’s in the fruit. It’s in the animals. So it’s all part of the cycle of life. Now, I’m not trying to scare people, but I want to bring it to our attention. And I’ve said this all along. We have to take our own responsibility to treat the quality of our water. And PFAS is just one thing. problem in a pool of other contaminants within our water supply pharmaceuticals absolutely pharmaceuticals is another concern that we’re going to have to deal with and we’ll bring that to your attention as well but PFAS how many cancers in the last let’s say you know 10 years have people have succumbed to that were created because of the water that they drink And it stays in our body. It accumulates in our body. And, you know, other research we found that, you know, pregnant women, you know how pregnant women get rid of PFAS contamination? By breastfeeding. Now, that’s scary, isn’t it? When a pregnant woman breastfeeds, the PFAS leave her body and go to the newborn baby. That’s a fact. Okay, Luke, let’s go.
SPEAKER 04 :
Even though Amara and Lexi’s mother Amy believe that these cancers are linked to PFAS chemicals, it’s something that’s very hard to prove. It takes years of research, both on a population level and in particular when you look at one individual. But fears about the water intensified by what would come out in the 2010s. Minnesota sued 3M for damaging the state’s natural resources with its dumping of PFAS. And in doing so, a mass of the company’s internal documents were released. What they revealed has been described as a scientific cover-up.
SPEAKER 03 :
Seeing the documents that in 1975, 3M was told, we think we’re finding your chemicals, these perfluorinated materials, in the blood of the general U.S. population. And to see what was going on internally, 3M started testing its own workers and found, yes, this chemical is building up in the workers who were exposed to this chemical.
SPEAKER 04 :
They were seeing studies of these chemicals on animals with disturbing effects.
SPEAKER 16 :
It shows that in 1997, 3M gave DuPont a material safety data sheet with a label that said cancer warning contains a chemical which can cause cancer. But 3M removed that label the same year and for decades sold PFAS without warning the public of its dangers.
SPEAKER 03 :
you see the companies internally debating, do we say anything? Do we tell the government? And unfortunately, what they decided was no.
SPEAKER 04 :
Some of 3M’s documents even showed that there had been a sort of whistleblower inside the company named Richard Purdy, who had… said the company wasn’t telling its customers about the risks of these chemicals and he resigned. He referred to 3M’s PFOS or P-F-O-S as the most insidious pollutant since PCBs.
SPEAKER 08 :
Some of the most notorious PFAS are PFOS and PFOA. So these are two PFAS molecules that have a carbon backbone with eight carbon atoms. These are the chemicals that so far have raised the greatest concern. These are the ones that show up most frequently in the environment. These are also the ones that show up most frequently in people’s bodies. they have half-lives in blood of years, which means that it would take years to decades for the levels in your blood to go down to an unmeasurable level.
SPEAKER 03 :
the 3M company had actually had one of its own scientists sit down and calculate what would be a safe level in human blood. And that scientist had calculated, and they even used the word safe on the headline of the document, that the safe level for this chemical in human blood would be no more than 1.05 parts per billion. At the time, in the late 1990s, the average level of that chemical being found in the general U.S. population’s blood was 30 times higher than that.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so that’s really important because during last year’s EPA webinar, they were talking about four part per billion. A target of four part per billion, yet they knew… that four part per billion was still too high. Now, at today’s time, they publish reports where they believe that the recommended contamination level for PFAS is zero. So it’s up to our municipality, our government, how are they going to address this problem? And we talked about how to remove PFAS from your home. Imagine the size of system that you would have to use to handle a community water filtration system, especially when you have six, eight-inch water mains feeding a community. So water filtration is not plug and play. And one of the things regarding water filtration is hard water will absolutely affect filtration. For example, I mentioned anion filtration media. Anion media or anion resin is super sensitive and it will not function under hard water. the hard water will destroy the anion resin media. If you have any questions, if you want to comment about this topic, give me a call here at 303-477-5600. That’s 303-477-5600. So this is why I mentioned before, maybe we should get tax breaks for people that, you know, do their own filtration. But then the filter medias that we use, eventually, you’re going to have to consider those hot or contaminated. And then we’re going to have to have a process of properly disposing water filters that’s going to be full of the PFAS. Another thing to consider, and we’ll get right back to our story here, but another thing to consider is the wastewater treatment issue that we have. And the human waste that’s removed, if that’s contaminated with PFAS, what are we going to do with the human waste? We used to sell the human waste as fertilizer to farms. But then we talked about stories, I believe in Texas and Wisconsin, where farms were contaminated, overly contaminated, because of the PFAS and the human waste that was used for fertilizer. This is a big problem that we’re going to have to really, you know, have some sincere thought process and what to do. Now, we can do it ourselves. We can definitely treat it ourselves, again, with a point-of-use reverse osmosis system. And we can absolutely, you know, set up a whole house anion resin-based system again. But if you have hard water, we definitely, it all starts with a water softener. And that’s something that we can help you out with with Water Pros. I encourage everybody… to you know dive into this and do your own research so you can see for yourself but to me this is not only a global concern but this is worse than a pandemic i mean we have a if you don’t have healthy water we don’t have a healthy life okay luke
SPEAKER 04 :
In 2018, 3M settled, but there was no admission that it had done anything wrong, that there had been a scientific cover-up, or what the real risk of these chemicals was.
SPEAKER 06 :
3M will pay $850 million to settle claims that contaminated water in Minnesota for decades.
SPEAKER 07 :
It’s hard to talk about in our community because… Like everyone loves 3M, right? There’s not a person I know personally from 3M who isn’t a stellar individual. I feel torn inside myself, but I am really angry at whoever at whatever level did what they did, especially after they knew the chemicals were dangerous and they kept doing it.
SPEAKER 04 :
So no one even knew what these chemicals were until this lawyer from Ohio came along. His name is Rob Bellot, and he took on the case of a farmer who had these cows downstream of a DuPont factory that were dying.
SPEAKER 21 :
It’s unbelievable. That calf had died miserable.
SPEAKER 04 :
And so Rob Balot’s story is now told in the film Dark Waters, where he’s played by Mark Ruffalo.
SPEAKER 22 :
DuPont is knowingly poisoning 70,000 local residents for the last four years.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s not what I was trained to do. That wasn’t the kind of thing I was normally doing at the time. I was actually working with chemical companies and big corporate clients, helping them navigate all the federal, state, international laws, rules, regulations, governing, things going out into the environment. it was actually through that case that we took on back in 1998 that we first found out that these man-made chemicals we now call pfos forever chemicals even existed what we’re seeing is not only are we finding all these potential human health impacts but we’re seeing them happening at lower and lower dose levels and exposure levels We recently had the Federal Environmental Protection Agency come out and essentially say, if you can detect this, it’s of health concern.
SPEAKER 04 :
The safety advisories keep getting lower and lower. From 70 parts per trillion for both PFOA and PFOS in drinking water in 2016, the EPA lowered it to just four parts per trillion each. That’s less than a single drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Each time those levels are lowered, it means that more people live in an area where contaminated water is thought to be a concern. A recent study found that as many as 200 million people are drinking water with more than the acceptable levels of PFAS. That’s around two-thirds of Americans. states are taking action and one of those states is Minnesota, they’re not taking any chances with the PFAS that are in drinking water. And to do that, they’re trying out new types of water filters.
SPEAKER 10 :
PFAS is out in the environment and it will spread as far as the water can spread it. It’s left the barn. It’s out of the gate. This waterway is carrying the PFAS right where the air meets the water. And these little bubbles are sort of signs that there might be PFAS in that water. PFAS has a hydrophobic and a hydrophilic nature to it. So if you think about it as like a caterpillar, the head of the caterpillar is hydrophilic. It wants to be in the water. And the tail of it wants to be out of the water. It’s hydrophobic. So it kind of surfs along. And so it actually has that property that behaves the same way out in the environment on its own, or whether you’re putting it in the water or on a pan, it’s going to behave the same way. So mother nature is saying, here’s your PFAS, it’s in the foam. And so we want to take advantage of that and do the most removal we can.
SPEAKER 09 :
It’s called the SAF. It’s surface activated foam fractionation. We fill those full of contaminated water and then we are able to physically remove the PFAS by foaming it, adding air into the system. And then we pull the PFAS off of that foam again. And that’s where we get a small volume of very high concentrated PFAS containing liquid.
SPEAKER 10 :
Thus far, the test has shown us that we can remove roughly 92 to 98% of PFOA and PFAS. It could run at least at 60,000 gallons of water treatment per day. And this is just one small system. So this is effectively the test to see whether we can scale this up to very large volumes. And can we apply this in a permanent location to reduce the PFAS in the environment altogether?
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s not just 3M or DuPont who are responsible for PFAS pollution. There’s about a dozen companies that have produced PFAS around the world. Highly concentrated levels have been found in Europe, Japan and Australia. It’s become a multi-billion dollar problem globally. Like the US, a lot of these sites are places where the chemicals are manufactured or sites where other companies use them. One of the most widespread sources are military bases and airports, where firefighting foams containing 3M’s PFOS were sprayed right into the ground.
SPEAKER 14 :
We’re just going right through here.
SPEAKER 09 :
So you’re here to have your blood drawn?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 09 :
All right. So come on with me here.
SPEAKER 04 :
I’ve come to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York to have my blood taken and tested for a variety of PFAS. We’ll give you a little warning there. All used in different products and made all over the world. So we know these chemicals are everywhere and they’re in everyone. The question is obviously, you know, what level of them is unsafe? It’s something that science is still trying to figure out. Personally, I’ve wondered if I could avoid these chemicals as well. PFAS, like a lot of other chemicals, can bioaccumulate, which means it sort of moves up the food chain and becomes more concentrated in predators and apex predators. And one of the places where a lot of the cutting edge research is being done is, surprisingly, the Faroe Islands. This small archipelago in the North Atlantic has a population of just over 50,000 people. There is no manufacturing of chemicals here. There’s this quirk of local culture that people have eaten whale meat for generations and whale meat can have very highly concentrated levels of chemicals in it.
SPEAKER 19 :
Pilot whales as a kind of a gift from nature because over centuries we have harvested them in hundreds and around thousand per year. They were seen as really a gift almost from heaven. I went out to the public saying that pregnant women, especially a woman who intended to become pregnant, they should really be careful eating pilot whale meat.
SPEAKER 04 :
Dr. Paul Waihi and his team found mercury was getting into the local population from whale meat and other seafood. The scientists have studied the Faroese since the 1980s. Every so often, a new cohort of hundreds of children under one year old are added to the research. Their physical and mental development is examined all the way into adult life. They’re tested for things such as balance, reaction time, body composition, lung and heart function, even the antibodies in their blood. As the Faroese reduced their consumption of pilot whale, the scientists saw the levels of mercury in their blood lower over time. But unlike mercury, PFAS chemicals are in everything. In the Faroe Islands, people have stain-proof couches and waterproof jackets just like the rest of us. Even in people who had very low levels of the chemicals, the scientists started spotting things that really concerned them.
SPEAKER 19 :
What we saw surprised us very much. And we saw that the negative effect on the antibody formation was much higher in children exposed to PFAS than to PCB and other substances.
SPEAKER 20 :
people in the Faroe Islands, far away from pollution, and they were exposed to these compounds at something we thought was very low concentrations. And still, we found that every time that a child had a double concentration, of PFAS in the blood, the child would lose half of the antibody. Essentially, the vaccines did not work. It means that there is a fault, a weakness in your immune system. It’s not functioning optimally. We can see that those kids who have higher exposures have a weaker skeleton. And there’s a tendency of, at young ages, to develop what we call prediabetes.
SPEAKER 11 :
Okay, I just do the last test.
SPEAKER 04 :
So as these studies evolve and we learn more about the links between high PFAS levels and health problems, how close are we to understanding how much is too much?
SPEAKER 20 :
The World Health Organization experts on cancer believe that if you don’t have an optimally functioning immune system, you may be more vulnerable to cancer. So we can see the various diseases that are sort of triggered, if not facilitated. I would call this is a multi-organ toxicant, PFAS. It affects multiple targets, and it may be that different PFASs that each take their pick of their favorite toxicity. We’re trying to decipher that.
SPEAKER 04 :
One of the most disturbing things that persists as a scientific problem with PFAS is that there’s no known way to get them out of our bodies. There’s only one way that’s known of, and unfortunately that’s through mothers giving birth. They’re offloading their PFAS to their children, both at the time of birth and through breastfeeding. And this just has huge implications for not just our generation, but the generations to come that we’re passing these PFAS on to our children.
SPEAKER 01 :
So I want to point something out. Types of cancer becoming more common in young people. Men and women in the prime of their lives are increasingly becoming diagnosed with serious cancers, including colorectal, breast cancer, prostate cancer, uterine, stomach, gastric cancer, pancreatic cancer. The forecast is predicting that cancer for the young people will increase globally by 30% from 2019 to 2030. Is it because of the water that we drink?
SPEAKER 04 :
Elsa Helmsdale is both a scientist who studies PFAS, a person who has been through the cohorts, and a mother who’s had to deal with PFAS on a very personal level.
SPEAKER 12 :
I thought a lot about it and I decided to only breastfeed for six months, even though the recommendation is that you breastfeed for a year.
SPEAKER 04 :
Wow. Did it feel strange to think about being sort of pre-polluted or sharing your pollution with your child?
SPEAKER 12 :
Yeah, it did. And also because I didn’t know my own levels and you actually give… a lot of the contaminants, in this case the PFAS, to children so their levels go really high and your levels drop as a consequence of breastfeeding. I didn’t think about it that much when I was testing myself but I do think about it a lot when it comes to my kids.
SPEAKER 20 :
We’re starting to understand that early life exposures can change the configuration of our chromosomes. And so the question is, is it something that can affect future generations if we pollute or expose the currently pregnant women? And this has been shown in rodent studies that it can happen. The pesticide is completely gone, but the changed DNA chemistry is not.
SPEAKER 04 :
PFAS aren’t just a problem for humans. The chemicals have been detected in animals for decades, from polar bears in the Arctic to dolphins in India. In the Faroe Islands, they’re also studying the impact on wildlife. Ornithologist Schroeder Hammer is looking at their effects, both on seabirds and to ecosystems as a whole.
SPEAKER 13 :
We’re fairly confident that the PFAS that we’re finding in seabirds, for the most part, comes from their diet. There’s important research done quite recently on how pollutants have a negative impact on top predators in particular, where you see high concentrations, and that has a knock-on effect on their, it could be parasite load, but it could also be their likelihood to catch infections or to survive a pandemic like avian influenza.
SPEAKER 04 :
So if we were to lose an apex predator like the great squaw, what are the consequences ecologically?
SPEAKER 13 :
Ecologically, top predators are so very important in stabilizing the ecosystem. They have a kind of controlling top-down effect on the ecosystem.
SPEAKER 04 :
Are there other consequences ecologically to these birds in particular having PFAS or other chemicals?
SPEAKER 13 :
We very often look for sublethal effects. They may have more subtle effects on their reproduction, for example. And also in relation to PFAS, there are indications that the mothers pass it on to their eggs. So there’s what we call maternal transfer as well.
SPEAKER 04 :
Just as with humans.
SPEAKER 13 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 19 :
We have documented some of the negative consequences and we send the message back to you. Please learn the lesson. It can be irresponsible just to invent some new substances and produce them and send them out without any control.
SPEAKER 04 :
As more has been learned about the health hazards of these chemicals, regulation of PFAS has really picked up. It’s forcing a reckoning for the chemical companies. They’re seeing settlements from lawsuits that are amounting to tens of billions of dollars. While claims that PFAS chemicals cause cancer have been litigated elsewhere, there’s never been a major trial in Minnesota. Skeptics say the state’s drinking water contains other contaminants, but many people living in areas with high levels of PFAS still question 3M’s role. Even since the 2018 settlement, Minnesota is still working out how to deal with PFAS.
SPEAKER 22 :
The PFAS legislation that we have, this year we named it the Amara Law. It will ban non-essential use. It will require labeling of any product that has PFAS in it.
SPEAKER 07 :
these manufacturers were coming forward wanting to be considered essential. So that’s how we found out there were all these products that had PFAS in them because they wanted to be on the essential list.
SPEAKER 17 :
We didn’t know how extensive PFAS chemicals were in different products. We kept learning more and more every day of the thousands of products that contained these chemicals.
SPEAKER 07 :
And at the same time, how would any of us know? It’s not listed on ingredients. It’s not listed on what is used to make this particular shampoo or this particular dental floss.
SPEAKER 14 :
We need stricter regulations on the use of PFA’s chemicals and more research to be done on the long-term effects of exposure. We also need more education for the public about the dangers of these chemicals so that people can make informed choices about the products they use.
SPEAKER 07 :
Her voice in the legislature was a voice for the community. They saw her as she was getting weaker. I saw her as getting clear, in many ways stronger than she’d ever been.
SPEAKER 22 :
She was a champion for us this year, bringing awareness to this issue. Unfortunately, you know, she passed away, I think it was three days before we had the bill on the floor for the first time.
SPEAKER 17 :
All Amara was asking for in the testifying at the Capitol was for companies who are using these chemicals do the right thing and take responsibility for their use.
SPEAKER 07 :
Her life doesn’t seem over to me because she puts so much in motion and those things are still in motion. And so there’s no over for me yet.
SPEAKER 01 :
So as of April 2024, the EPA finalized drinking water standards for some PFAS which set legally enforceable maximum contamination levels for PFAS and drinking water. And so we’re at PFOAs are four part per trillion. PFOS at four part per trillion. PFHXS at ten part per trillion. Now remember what a part per trillion is different from a part per billion, isn’t it? So that’s even a smaller amount. So you go from a part per billion to part per trillion. I just wanted to point that out. And so because they said a part per billion, if you take an Olympic-sized swimming pool, it’s just one drop. So they went from a part per billion to a part per trillion. A mixture containing two or more of the PFAS contaminants is a hazardous index. And based on combined levels of these chemicals, that also can affect the standards. The maximum contamination Levels are different, and those, based on drinking water standards and levels which have to be reliably measured, the public water system must start monitoring for the PFAS by 2027. So we have at least two more years before they have to start monitoring for this contaminant. The system must also provide the public with information on the levels of the PFAS and the drinking water starting in 2027 as well. So again, you heard that the recommendation was part per billion, and now the EPA eventually finalized their drinking water standards, and it’s even smaller. They want it at a part per trillion. If monitoring shows that our drinking water levels exceed the maximum contamination levels, a public water system must take measures to reduce the PFAS by 2029. So that means we have four years to come up with a game plan and how this is going to happen. Starting in 2029, public water systems that have PFAS levels exceeding one or more of these maximum contamination levels must take action to reduce levels of the PFAS in their drinking water and must notify the public of the excess levels. So I wonder when that’s going to start happening. They have basically four years. To ramp up a program, I haven’t heard anybody in our state government talking about this or even local government talking about this. It states that many states have their own regulations regarding PFAS, most commonly the PFOAs and the PFOS in drinking water. Some… of these are enforceable drinking water standards, while others are just guideline levels or they just require public water systems to regularly test for certain PFAS and notify the consumer. So, you know, Colorado has a problem at the state lab level already. And another scientist or lab tech said, was found to fudge water test results. And so now the state lab has stopped all testing of water. So, you know, I’d like to know if there’s another lab in the metro area that’s going to be testing municipal water samples for safety. But how many of those, you know, test for PFAS? I knew at the time the state of Colorado wasn’t set up to test for PFAS. So where is that going to be done? The specific PFAS that are regulated and the levels that are allowed vary among states that have these regulations. All state standards have to be at least as strict as the EPA drinking water standards that have been enacted on a federal level. What this means is this is a very serious issue. And in the very beginning, when this was exposed, they went from a part per billion down to a part per trillion. So I’ve always said this. It doesn’t take a large number to have contamination. Absolutely doesn’t. Now, again, we can treat this ourselves. We can use a point of use reverse osmosis unit at the kitchen sink with a separate faucet. We can use an anion resin based system that will remove it for the whole entire house. Both of those are strongly recommended to be supported by a point of use water softener. You have to, you know, Water filtration is not plug and play, and you absolutely have to remove hardness, iron content especially, in order for the anion resin system or the point of use reverse osmosis unit to be functional. We’re going to have more information on this. We’re going to continue to bring you stories, to bring you information that you can clearly find for yourself. I encourage everybody to do the research. And I think it’s going to be up to us to filter and take care of our own water. But we’re going to have to start knocking on the door of our politicians, especially at the state level. I haven’t heard anything out of Governor Polis’ administration to talk about water quality, water contamination, and what we’re going to do with this PFAS problem because Colorado has a PFAS problem for sure, especially down south in Colorado Springs by the Air Force bases down there. I’m sure here in Denver Metro area as well. The firefighting foam that we use in all the forest fires, absolutely, you know, DIA with the PFAS and their firefighting foam and the drills that they use. And it’s something that we learned that has spread globally. It’s a bioaccumulant contamination. It’s everywhere. And as it gets into the human waste and we get rid of the human waste from the waste treatment plants, it’s going to get back into our water supply. Are we creating a never-ending cycle of PFAS contamination? Because these chemicals don’t break down. These chemicals do not go away and they stay in our body. Stick with us. We’re going to have more information on this. I appreciate you stopping by today and hanging out with us. And I want everybody to have a very blessed day. God bless you all.
SPEAKER 02 :
Remember to reach out to Paul the Waterman with your questions and water filtration needs, and be sure to tune in to Water Talk Thursdays at 2 p.m. to talk with Paul. And for more information, find him on the programming page at klzradio.com.
