Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. Today, we are starting with a
story that feels like it's straight out of a mystery novel.
We're in Chicago nineteen twenty nine and.
Speaker 2: People are dying in their homes, seemingly without cause exactly.
Speaker 1: These aren't crimes of passion or anything obvious. People are
just passing away and it takes weeks, tragically for the
authorities to piece it together.
Speaker 2: After fifteen deaths, they finally find the culprit. It's the
one thing everyone was bringing into their homes as a
sign of modern progress.
Speaker 1: The refrigerator.
Speaker 2: The refrigerator, yeah, a silent killer. The refrigerant they used
back then was a chemical called methyl chloride' it's toxic,
it has no smell, and it's flammable, so a tiny leak.
Speaker 1: You'd never know. And other models used gases that were
so flammable that a spark from a stove could cause
an explosion. It was a genuine public health.
Speaker 2: Crisis, which you know, spurred this massive mission. Companies like
DuPont put their top minds on it. The goal was simple, really.
Speaker 1: Find a new chemical for refrigeration, one that was completely inert,
not toxic, not flammable, just safe.
Speaker 2: And it's the irony of it all that is so profound.
This quest, which was born out of a desire to
save lives, unintentionally created a material that would decades later
be described as slowly poisoning everyone on the planet.
Speaker 1: And that's our mission today on Thrilling Threads. We're going
to dive into publicly available documents, corporate records, scientific testimony,
all to untangle the threads of one of the biggest
chemical cover ups in history.
Speaker 2: We're looking at a massive worldwide contamination and the crazy
thing is it's from chemicals that are completely man made.
You can trace the fingerprints back to just a couple
of companies, and for you listening.
Speaker 1: This deep dive is really a shortcut. It's a way
to understand why you almost certainly have these chemicals in
your body.
Speaker 2: Right now, and more importantly, what the science says you
can actually do about it.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into it. The story of this magic
powder begins in nineteen thirty.
Speaker 2: Six, right in the search for that safe refrigerant, DuPont
puts a young chemist on the job. He's only twenty sive.
His name is Roy J.
Speaker 1: Plunkett, and he's working with a gas called tetrafluoroethylene tf
E for short.
Speaker 2: TFE seemed promising. It was stable, so the thinking was
pretty straightforward. Could this stuff do the heat exchange needed
for refrigeration without killing people?
Speaker 1: But the actual discovery was a complete accident, one of
those classic aha moments. Plunkett and his assistant go to
use the cylinder of TFI gas.
Speaker 2: A cylinder they think is full, right, he.
Speaker 1: Twists the valve and nothing comes out.
Speaker 2: So his first thought is, Oh, it must have leaked.
The cylinder is a dud. He's about to toss it.
Speaker 1: But something stops him. He picks it up and realizes
it's still heavy. It weighs the same as a full cylinder, which.
Speaker 2: Just doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: If the gas is gone, the weight should be gone.
Speaker 1: It was a moment of pure confusion. So what do
they do. They grab a saw.
Speaker 2: They literally saw the steel cylinder in half, and inside
there's no gas. Instead, the walls are coated with this strange, white, slippery.
Speaker 1: Powder, something Plunket had never seen before. So the big
question is what happened to the gas?
Speaker 2: Well, plunk It put it together. He reasoned that under
the intense pressure inside that cylinder. Maybe with a little
help from some iron bits from the cylinder wall acting
as a catalyst.
Speaker 1: Something must have snapped.
Speaker 2: Exactly, Uh, the double bond between the two carbon atoms
in that TFE molecule.
Speaker 1: It just broke, and that set off a chain reaction.
Speaker 2: A classic polymerization. Once that bond breaks, each carbon atom
is looking for something to link to, so it grabs
onto a carbon from a neighboring TF molecule.
Speaker 1: Which breaks its double bond, and so on and so on.
Speaker 2: Thousands, maybe millions of times the gas had transformed, linking
up into these incredibly long chains. The result was this powder,
polytetrafluoroethylene ptfe.
Speaker 1: Plunk. It was apparently furious at first, this weird substance
had ruined his whole experiment.
Speaker 2: But before he threw it out, his scientific curiosity took over.
He started testing it. He pours it, beads right off.
He tries the strongest acid he has in the lab. Nothing,
the strongest base, every solvent he can think of.
Speaker 1: Nothing. The powder just sits there. It's completely inert and nonreactive. Yeah,
it seems.
Speaker 2: Indestructible, and that property, that chemical indifference, is the whole story.
It's both the miracle and the curse. It all comes
down to one single thing.
Speaker 1: In its chemistry, the carbon fluorine bond, the CF bond.
Speaker 2: We really have to zoom in on this because it
explains everything that comes later, why it's so useful and
why it's so dangerous.
Speaker 1: So why is that bond so incredibly strong?
Speaker 2: It really boils down to fluorine being well greedy chemically,
speaking of course, greed. It's the most electron hungry atom
on the entire periodic table. We call that electron negativity.
It's just one electron short of having a full outer shell,
and it wants that last electron more than anything.
Speaker 1: So when it bonds with carbon, it doesn't just share
an electron.
Speaker 2: It practically steals it. It pulls that electron from Carbon's
so close to its own nucleus, and because fluorine is
such a tiny atom, its nucleus gets exceptionally close to
that electron.
Speaker 1: Which creates a powerful attraction.
Speaker 2: An incredibly powerful electrostatic attraction. The fluorine becomes slightly negative,
the carbons slightly positive, and it locks that bond into place.
It's less of a handshake and more of a chemical vice. Grip.
Speaker 1: Wow. So in terms of energy, what does that mean.
Speaker 2: It means the CF bond is the strongest single bond
that carbon can form with any other atom. Period It
takes a colossal amount of energy to break it. Heat
acid enzymes in your body. They just don't have enough power.
Speaker 1: So when you string all those TFE molecules together to
make PTFE, you get this long carbon backbone that's completely shielded.
Speaker 2: It's like an armored shell of these super strong CF bonds.
Any other molecules like water or stomach acid just bounce
off the PTFE molecule chemically ignores them.
Speaker 1: And that explains why Plunkets magic powder wouldn't react with anything.
Speaker 2: And that persistence, the fact that it never breaks down
is exactly what causes all the problems later. If it
doesn't break down in a lab, it's not going to
break down in a river or in the soil or
inside you.
Speaker 1: So Plunkett has this incredible material, but at first they
have no idea what to do with it.
Speaker 2: Right, it's a solution without a problem. But that changed
very quickly because of a massive top secret government.
Speaker 1: Project, Manhattan Project.
Speaker 2: DuPont was contracted by the US Army to help develop
the atomic bomb, and this is where this kitchen staple
gets tangled up in world history.
Speaker 1: To enrich uranium for the bomb, they first had to
turn it into a gas, a really really nasty gas
called uranium hexafluoride.
Speaker 2: And this gas was unbelievably corrosive. It just ate through
everything it touched. All the pipes the gas gets the
seals at the massive Oak Ridge Enrichment plant were constantly.
Speaker 1: Failing, which meant they had to shut down production all
the time to replace parts. Yeah, with a huge bottleneck
in the war effort.
Speaker 2: But then someone at DuPont had a brilliant idea. They
had this inert powder PTFE. What if they could use
it to line the equipment.
Speaker 1: They figured out how to machine the powder under extreme
pressure into solid shapes, gaskets, seals, linings for the pipes.
Speaker 2: And it worked perfectly. The uranium hexafluoride was no match
for it. The stuff was so good. The plant manager,
a man named Gordon Fee, later said there was never
a substitute considered.
Speaker 1: As far as I know, dupot knew they had a winner.
In nineteen forty four they trademarked.
Speaker 2: It and the name is actually pretty clever. They took
te from tetra fl from fluoro and then just added
o n at the end.
Speaker 1: Like other miracle materials of the era, rayon.
Speaker 2: Nylas exactly and you get teflon.
Speaker 1: But moving from making a few gaskets for the army
to mass production was a huge challenge.
Speaker 2: A nightmare. Actually. The material's greatest strengths were also its
biggest weaknesses for manufacturing. It resists solvents, so you can't
dissolve it to spray it. It's stable at high heat,
so it's hard to melt and mold, And there was.
Speaker 1: A much bigger, more terrifying problem. Explosions.
Speaker 2: The chemical reaction that turns tfe gas into teflon polymer,
it's exothermic. It releases a ton.
Speaker 1: Of heat, and if you don't control that heat.
Speaker 2: If the reaction gets localized and heats up past about
two hundred degrees celsius, the tf gas just decomposes violently.
It releases a massive amount of energy all at once.
And this wasn't just a theoretical risk, no, It tragically
happened at their Arlington plant in nineteen forty four, a
massive explosion killed two workers. Productions screeched to a halt.
They had to find a way to make it safe.
Speaker 1: The obvious solution to get rid of heat is water.
Water is amazing at absorbing energy.
Speaker 2: Right, But there's a problem. TFE gas is hydrophobic. It
hates water. It won't dissolve.
Speaker 1: So if you just bubble the gas through water, it
doesn't mix. The reaction still happens in a concentrated dry spot,
and you still have the risk of an explosion.
Speaker 2: And they needed a bridge, a chemical middleman that could
get the TFE gas to disperse evenly throughout the water.
Speaker 1: And this is where the second key chemical enters our story, right,
the one that would cause all the trouble.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty one, DuPont went shopping. They bought a
special kind of acid from another company three M chemical
was called perfluoroectonoic acid.
Speaker 1: We know it today is PFOA, or much more.
Speaker 2: Simply C eight C eight because it has a chain
of eight carbon atoms, all covered in those super strong
fluorine bonds.
Speaker 1: So what was so special about C eight? Why was it?
The solution?
Speaker 2: C eight acts like a very powerful industrial soap, what
chemists call an amphophilic molecule.
Speaker 1: Meaning it has two different ends.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it has a long tail made of carbon and fluorine,
which is hydrophobic. It hates water, just like teflon. But
on the other end, it has an acid head and
that part is hydrophilic. It loves water.
Speaker 1: So it's a chemical mediator, a perfect one.
Speaker 2: When you add C eight to the water, the molecules
instantly self assemble. They form these tiny microscopic bubbles or
spheres called muscells.
Speaker 1: And how does that work.
Speaker 2: The water hating tails all tuck inside the bubble, away
from the water, and the water loving heads all face outwards,
interacting with the water.
Speaker 1: So you get these little dry pockets floating in.
Speaker 2: The water exactly. And when you inject the TFE gas,
which also hates water, it rushes straight into the dry
core of those caa missls. Suddenly your TFE is spread
out perfectly evenly throughout the water bath and you.
Speaker 1: Can start the reaction safely.
Speaker 2: Yes, the reaction happens gently inside millions of these tiny bubbles,
and the water all around them just soaks up the heat.
The explosion risk was gone, and as.
Speaker 1: A huge bonus, the teflon was now suspended in a
liquid solution.
Speaker 2: A milky liquid, which meant, for the first time, you
could spray it onto a surface as a coating.
Speaker 1: I have to admit I've always wondered how you get
something that's famous for being non stick to actually stick
to a pan.
Speaker 2: It's a really ingenious trick, and it's purely mechanical, not chemical.
Speaker 1: Okay, so how does it work?
Speaker 2: First they take the metal pan and they sam blast
it with very fine grit. This creates a rough surface
full of microscopic, jagged grooves and valleys.
Speaker 1: You're creating an anchor point.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect way to put it. Then they spray
on the teflon solution. When they heat the pan to
cure it, the water and the c eight just evaporate away,
but the teflon polymer is left behind, and as it
heats it softens, flows into all this tiny crevices and
then hardens. It's not chemically bonded to the pan at all.
It's just mechanically locked into the surface.
Speaker 1: That's brilliant. So after the military secrecy was lifted, this
technology just exploded onto the consumer market.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. The story goes that in nineteen fifty four, a
French engineer named Mark Gregoire coated his fishing gear with
it to stop tangles. His wife saw it and said, hey,
why don't you try that on one of my pans.
Speaker 1: And the nonstick cooking revolution was born from there.
Speaker 2: It was just everywhere. DuPont's marketing was incredible. Even oatmeal
won't stick to teflon. The sales were astronomical.
Speaker 1: And it went way beyond just pans. Three M used
a similar chemical PFOS to create Scotch Guard for stained
resistant carpets.
Speaker 2: You had gortex using PTFE for waterproof but breathable jackets.
Because it's so inert, it was perfect for medical implants
that the body wouldn't reject.
Speaker 1: It was even us to coat the steel framework of
the Statue of Liberty.
Speaker 2: It was so untouchable that it became part of the culture.
In the late eighties, the mob boss John Gotti was
called the Teflon Dawn because no criminal charges would ever
stick to him.
Speaker 1: By the end of the nineties, that Tefron business alone
was making DuPont about a billion dollars a year. They
seemed completely invincible.
Speaker 2: Chemically and commercially, yes, But underneath that shiny nonstick surface,
the true cost was starting to bubble.
Speaker 1: Up, which brings us to a small town in West Virginia, Carkersburg,
home of the first commercial teflon.
Speaker 2: Plant and home to a farmer named Earl Tenant.
Speaker 1: Earl's story is really where the cover up begins to unravel.
He hires a lawyer, Rob Billet, for a very strange reason.
His cows are dying.
Speaker 2: And not in a normal way. They were just wasting away.
Their teeth were turning black, they were growing tumors, the
hair was falling off their hoofs vets. Had no idea
what was causing it.
Speaker 1: Earl had some VHS capes he'd filmed, and he showed
them to Rob. They showed his cows standing in this
creek and this milky white phone was coming out of
a discharge.
Speaker 2: Pipe, a pipe with a sign on it e I.
Speaker 1: Do Pont th Namoor in Company. It was draining directly
from the Washington Works factory into the creek on his farm.
Speaker 2: Now you have to understand, in a town like Parkersburg,
DuPont was the town. They provided all the jobs, they
built community centers, they were everything.
Speaker 1: So when word got out that Earl was investigating DuPont,
he and his family became outcasts.
Speaker 2: People would cross the street to avoid them. The social
pressure was.
Speaker 1: Immense, but Rob Billett took the case. He figured he'd
just look at the EPA permits for the factory.
Speaker 2: Right, those permits list every chemical a company is allowed
to discharge. But nothing on the list could explain the
white foam or what was happening to those cows. The
mystery substance wasn't on the permits.
Speaker 1: Now, it's important to make a distinction here. The teflon itself,
the PTFE was generally known to be safe if you
ate it. The molecules are just too big and inert.
Speaker 2: To be absorbed, right, It just passes through you. The
bigger concern with teflon was always what happens when.
Speaker 1: You overheat it orr fume fever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you heat a pan to over say three
hundred and fifty celsius, it releases fumes that can give
you flu like symptoms. It's especially toxic to pet birds.
Speaker 1: But the cows weren't being cooked, so Robin knew it
had to be something else. He filed a legal request
for every single operational document from the.
Speaker 2: Plant, and DuPont probably trying to bury him in paperwork
sent him over sixty thousand documents, stacks and stacks of boxes.
Speaker 1: But Rob read every single one, and one name kept
appearing over and over again. C. Eight. This is where
the story turns from an industrial accident into an active
coverup because Rob found internal DuPont records from nineteen sixty one, the.
Speaker 2: Same year non stick pans were first sold, and these
were reports from their own scientists about toxicity tests they
ran on C eight.
Speaker 1: And the results were not good, not at all.
Speaker 2: They found that feeding rats, even a small amount, just
one point five milligrams per kilogram of body weight, caused
their livers to grow abnormally.
Speaker 1: Large, and the higher dose was lethal.
Speaker 2: Yes, around five hundred and seventy miligrams per kilogram. Now
that's a high dose. But the real concern wasn't immediate death.
It was something much more insidious.
Speaker 1: It was about two key properties that really define this
whole family of forever chemicals.
Speaker 2: The first is persistence. Just like teflon C eight is
covered in those CF bonds, it does not break down,
not in water, not in soil, not in your body.
It just stays for.
Speaker 1: Decades, eighty centuries.
Speaker 2: And the second property bioaccumulation. This is the really scary
part Ight's structure. That chain of carbons looks a lot
like the natural fatty acids our bodies use for energy
and self function.
Speaker 1: So it's like a trojan horse.
Speaker 2: An excellent analogy because it looks at a fatty acid.
It can basically trick the body's transport systems. It hitches
a ride on proteins in the bloodstream and gets carried everywhere.
Speaker 1: To the liver, the kidneys, the brain.
Speaker 2: Pretty much anywhere. And because the body has no enzymes
that can break that CF bond, it can't get rid
of it. So every tiny exposure, day after day just adds.
Speaker 1: Up, builds up in your tissues over your entire lifetime.
It's a dicking time bomb.
Speaker 2: And DuPont's own internal studies kept confirming the danger. By
nineteen sixty two, they knew it could damage the stomach, brain,
and lungs and rats. By nineteen sixty five they saw
the same effects and dogs. They were even studying monkeys
and some of them were just dropping dead.
Speaker 1: All of this evidence toxic effects across multiple organs in
multiple species was known inside the company for decades.
Speaker 2: And it was never shared not with the public, not
with the EPA, not with the wider scientific community. They
actively kept its secret.
Speaker 1: And that secret might have stayed buried if not for
a completely unrelated piece of research happening in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 2: Right scientists across the US were studying the effects of
adding inorganic fluoride to drinking water to prevent tooth decay.
Speaker 1: So they were taking blood samples from the general population
to see how much was being absorbed.
Speaker 2: And they found the inorganic fluoride, just like they expected,
but they also found something else, a second type of fluorine.
They couldn't identify.
Speaker 1: Organic floor the kind with carbon fluorine bonds.
Speaker 2: Which does not occur in nature, and the levels didn't
match up with water fluoridation. They had no idea where
it was coming from, so they.
Speaker 1: Reached out to three M, the main manufacture of these
kinds of chemicals, and asked if it could be one
of their compounds like PFOA.
Speaker 2: At first, three M claimed they had no idea what
it was, complete ignorance, but.
Speaker 1: Just three months later their own internal documents show they
confirmed it. They knew their chemicals were in the blood
of the general US population.
Speaker 2: And they didn't tell the researchers. They sat on that
information for years. They knew since nineteen seventy five that
pretty much everyone was contaminated.
Speaker 1: At the same time, both DuPont and three MS started
checking the blood of their own factory workers.
Speaker 2: And what they found was staggering. The C eight levels
in their workers were a thousand times higher than in
the general population, and many of those workers were already
showing signs of liver disease.
Speaker 1: In all the while, the Washington Works plant was dumping
almost ten tons of C eight into the Ohio River
every year.
Speaker 2: And piling up thousands of tons of C eight sludge
in that landfill right next to Earle Tennant's farm.
Speaker 1: The alarm bills inside the company got a lot louder.
In the early nineteen eighties, a study on rats finally
confirmed that PFOA causes pesticular tumors. It was the carcinogen,
So now.
Speaker 2: They know it's toxic. It bioaccumulates, it's in the environment,
and it causes cancer and animals. So in nineteen eighty
four they test the public water supply around the factory.
Speaker 1: And they find it C eight is in the drinking
water of the surrounding communities.
Speaker 2: So the executives meet. They discussed switching to a safer
chemical alternative, but their own meeting minutes show they concluded
that the alternatives were not economically attractive.
Speaker 1: It'd cost too much, so they decided to keep using
C eight.
Speaker 2: Instead of changing the chemical, they decided to change the
definition of safe. Their own scientists came up with a
safe limit for C eight in drinking water.
Speaker 1: They set the number at one part per billion one ppb.
Speaker 2: And here's the most cynical part. At that time, one
ppd was just about the law US level their equipment
could reliably detect, So they basically set the safety limit
at the limit of their own technology.
Speaker 1: If they couldn't measure it, they could claim it wasn't
there and therefore was safe.
Speaker 2: To give you a sense of scale, one part per
billion is one single drop of C eight in twenty huge,
twenty five hundred liters water tanks. That's what they decided
was acceptable for people to drink every day.
Speaker 1: But then they tested the water coming out of the landfill,
the water flowing into Earl's Creek, and.
Speaker 2: The result was sixteen hundred parts per billion.
Speaker 1: One thousand six hundred times their own self determined safe limit,
and they.
Speaker 2: Told no one. They kept it a secret.
Speaker 1: When Rob Billett finally found these documents, this was the
smoking gun. He wrote a nine hundred page letter to
the EPA and the Justice Department laying out the whole
decades long cover up.
Speaker 2: DuPont quickly settled with the tenant family for an undisclosed amount,
while still publicly denying any wrongdoing.
Speaker 1: But Red knew this was bigger than one farm. This
chemical was in the water for seventy thousand people in
the Parkersburg area, so he's sued DuPont again on behalf of.
Speaker 2: The entire community, and around the same time in the
year two thousand, the true scale of the problem became undeniable.
A huge study analyzed thousands of blood samples from across
the US.
Speaker 1: The result was shocking. One hundred percent of the samples
are positive for C eight. Every single person was contaminated,
with an average level of about five ppb.
Speaker 2: The question was no longer if we were exposed, the
question was what was it doing to us.
Speaker 1: To answer that, Rob billet in the community launched one
of the biggest epidemiological studies in history, starting in two
thousand and five, they collected medical data from all seventy
thousand people in the lawsuit.
Speaker 2: It took seven years to analyze all that data. Sadly,
Earl Tenant and his wife both passed away before they
could hear the results.
Speaker 1: Finally, in twenty thirteen, the Independent eight Science Panel released
their findings and it was a bombshell.
Speaker 2: They confirmed a probable link between CA exposure and six
specific human diseases.
Speaker 1: Those six were thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer, ul
sort of lightis high cholesterol, and preaclancia, a dangerous complication
in pregnancy.
Speaker 2: This was the proof a direct link between the single
industrial chemical and a whole host of serious health problems
in humans.
Speaker 1: And they could even quantify the risk for men with
C eight levels over thirty ppv in their blood the
odds of getting kidney cancer basically doubled.
Speaker 2: The scientific verdict was in and DuPont was forced to act.
They agreed to phase out C eight by twenty thirteen
and eventually paid over six hundred million dollars in settlements,
but they never admitted wrongdoing.
Speaker 1: And the story doesn't end there, because as soon as
they stopped using C eight. They just switched to something else.
Speaker 2: This is the whack a mole problem. DuPont spun off
its chemical business into a new company, Himmers and Chamers
immediately replaced C eight with a slightly different chemical.
Speaker 1: They just knocked two carbons off the chain, creating a
shorter molecule called C six or gen X.
Speaker 2: And Cheemers came out with a big marketing push, claiming
gen X was safer because it was shorter and would
break down more easily. They suggested a safe water limit
as high as seventy arts per billion.
Speaker 1: But they started making gen X at the exact same
plant in West Virginia, and surprise, surprise, it started showing
up in the Ohio River and the local drinking water.
Speaker 2: And when scientists finally did a cancer study on gen X,
what do you think they found?
Speaker 1: It caused the exact same three tumors in rats that
PFOA did, liver, testicular, and pancreatic.
Speaker 2: And that shorter chain that was supposed to be a benefit,
it actually made gen X more mobile in groundwater, so
it could contaminate larger areas even faster.
Speaker 1: So the companies just tweak a molecule, give it a
new name and force regulators and scientists to start the
entire decade long research process all over again.
Speaker 2: It's an endless game, and that's why we have to
talk about the entire family of.
Speaker 1: Chemicals pfaes per and polyfloral alcohol substances.
Speaker 2: It's a massive family. There are over fourteen thousand different
man made chemicals that fall under this umbrella, and they
all share that one defining feature, the.
Speaker 1: Carbon fluorine bond. That's why they're called forever chemicals.
Speaker 2: Their core property is that they repel both water and oil,
which makes them incredibly useful.
Speaker 1: So they're in fast food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, waterproof clothing, cosmetics,
contact lenses, the anti smudge coating on your phone screen.
They are literally everywhere.
Speaker 2: But before we get into exposure, we have to make
one really important distinction within the PFAS family. It's something
the industry uses to create confusion.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's break that down.
Speaker 2: You can basically split them into two groups. The first
group is the floor polymers. This is the actual teflon
the PTFE itself.
Speaker 1: These are the huge long chain molecules.
Speaker 2: Right, tens of thousands of atoms long. They're so big
and inert. Your body can't absorb them. If a flake
of teflon comes off your pan and you swallow it,
it just passes right through you. They are generally considered safe.
Speaker 1: So the finished product is not the main problem. It's
the processing aids used to make it exactly.
Speaker 2: That's the second group, the nasty ones, the perfloor al
coal acids or PFAAs. This includes PFOA, PFOS, gen X, pfhi.
Speaker 1: These are the short chain molecules right.
Speaker 2: Only five to ten carbons long. They're small enough to
get into your bloodstream, bind to proteins and dioaccumulate. These
are the ones that cause the systemic health risks.
Speaker 1: So what's the latest scientific consensus on how dangerous these
PFAAs really are.
Speaker 2: The most definitive statement we have is from a twenty
twenty two report by the National Academies of Sciences. They
looked at the data for just seven of the most
well studied PFAAs and what did they conclude. They set
up three risk tiers based on the total amount of
those seven chemicals in your blood.
Speaker 1: Okay, what are the tiers?
Speaker 2: Below two parts per billion is considered low risk. Between
two and twenty ppb. They say there's a potential for
harmful effects and if your level is above twenty pcb,
the risk is significantly greater, and they recommend additional medical screening.
Speaker 1: And did they link them to specific health problems like
the C eight panel did.
Speaker 2: Yes, they found the most consistent evidence linking these chemicals
to high cholesterol, a decreased immine response to vaccines, kidney cancer,
and decreased infant growth. The links are now undeniable.
Speaker 1: This is where I want to bring in my own
experience because I actually got my blood tested for these
chemicals earlier this.
Speaker 2: Year, and the results were quite a wake up call.
Speaker 1: For you, they really were. My PFOA level was pretty average,
about one point five ppb, but my PFOS, the old
Scotch card chemical, was almost nine tpb, more than double
the US average.
Speaker 2: And the PFHXSS was the really shocking one.
Speaker 1: My PFHxS level was nearly seven ppb. That's higher than
ninety five percent of the US population.
Speaker 2: And when you add them all up, your total came
to seventeen point nine to two.
Speaker 1: Ppb, just under that twenty ppb threshold where the National
Academy says the risk is greater. It was really sobering.
It just shows you can be living a healthy life
and still be highly contaminated.
Speaker 2: It really brings home the question where is all this
exposure coming from.
Speaker 1: Let's break it down into the three main sources. First,
the products themselves, and.
Speaker 2: Again we should bust the myth here. The biggest risk
isn't from using your nonstick pan at home. It's from
the pollution created when that pan was manufactured and when
it's eventually thrown away.
Speaker 1: So the problem is the factories.
Speaker 2: It's the factories. They have terrible containment records. The same
story we saw in West Virginia is now playing out
near chemical plants all over the world.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the second source is food.
Speaker 2: Yes, but mainly the packaging. Fast food wrappers, takeout boxes,
microwave popcorn bags are often coated with PFAAs to make
them greaseproof.
Speaker 1: I saw a study where they found that PFAAs could
leach from the popcorn bag into the oils of the
popcorn itself over time.
Speaker 2: That makes sense. The good news is there's an easy fix.
Reheat your leftovers on a real plate, not in the
cardboard container. Cooking at home more often dramatically reduces the
source of exposure.
Speaker 1: But the third and biggest source for most people is
drinking water.
Speaker 2: This is the one that's hardest to avoid and it's
where bioaccumulation really kicks in. The levels and water might
be tiny measured in parts per trillion.
Speaker 1: But because your body holds onto it, even those tiny
daily doses are enough to build a to high levels
in your blood measured in parts per billion over the years.
Speaker 2: The hotspots for water contamination are near the factories, but
also near military bases.
Speaker 1: And airports because of firefighting foam exactly.
Speaker 2: PFOA and pfos are key ingredients in a type of
high performance foam called AFFF. It's incredible at putting out
big fuel fires.
Speaker 1: So every time they do a training drill, all that
foam soaks into the ground and contaminates the groundwater for
miles around.
Speaker 2: And now it's reached planetary saturation. Scientists have found unsafe
levels of pfas in rain water even on the Tibetan Plateau.
The entire global water cycle is contaminated.
Speaker 1: This really explains my own test results. The area where
I used to live, Santa Clarita in California, has known
PFHxS contamination in the water around thirty seven parts.
Speaker 2: Per trillion, and there are online calculators that can predict
your blood level based on your water source.
Speaker 1: When I put in my data, the calculator predicted my
blood level will be six point eighty five ppb. My
actual lab result was six point eighty four ppb.
Speaker 2: The correlation is just chilling. It's direct proof of how
efficiently our bodies concentrate these chemicals from our water.
Speaker 1: This is the science that finally forced the EPA to act.
In April of twenty twenty four, they set the first
ever legally enforceable limits for pfas in US drinking water.
Speaker 2: And the new limit for PFOA and PFOS is stunningly low.
Speaker 1: They dropped it from that old one part per billion
down to just four parts per trillion.
Speaker 2: To put that in perspective, the old limit was one
drop in twenty large water tanks. The new limit is
one drop in five thousand large water tanks. That's about
five Olympic sized swimming pools.
Speaker 1: For comparison, the EPA limit for lead is ten thousand
parts per trillion. For cyanide it's two hundred thousand.
Speaker 2: The fact that they set the PFAS limit so incredibly
low shows you how concerned they are about the toxicity
of these chemicals, even at almost undetectable levels.
Speaker 1: So what can people do if you're worried about your water?
What are the solutions?
Speaker 2: Filtrations are the most effective individual action, but not just
any filter will work. You need one specifically certified to
remove pfas.
Speaker 1: And there are three main types that are effective.
Speaker 2: Right The gold standard is a reverse osmosis system. It
uses pressure to force water through a membrane with tiny
pores that the PFAS molecules are too big to get through.
Speaker 1: Then you have granular activated carbon filters or GAC. These
are common in picture filters. The PFAS molecules stick to
the surface of the carbon. They work, but you have
to change the cartridge.
Speaker 2: Frequently, and the third is ion exchange. These systems use
a special resin that essentially swaps out the charged PFAS
molecules for harmless ions like chloride.
Speaker 1: But let's put this in perspective. How should the average
person rank the worry about pfas against other health risks.
Speaker 2: That's a great question. I think of it as a
hierarchy the top tier. The things that will give you
the most benefit are still the basics. Don't smoke, eat well, exercise,
get enough sleep.
Speaker 1: The medium tier would be managing chronic conditions, seeing your
doctor regularly.
Speaker 2: And d prevention would fall into a lower tier for
most people, but there are specific groups who should be
more concerned.
Speaker 1: Who are those high risk groups?
Speaker 2: Pregnant people because PSAs crosses the placenta, young children because
their bodies are developing, and people in high exposure jobs,
especially firefighters.
Speaker 1: Speaking of firefighters, there was a really fascinating study in
twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Two, the blood Lettings Study. It showed that firefighters who
regularly donated blood or plasma saw their PFAS levels dropped
by up to thirty percent in a year. It's the
first hint that there might be a way to physically
remove these chemicals from the body, but for.
Speaker 1: Now there are no approved medical treatments. Prevention is the.
Speaker 2: Only option, which means the real solution has to be
corporate and regulatory. We have to stop these chemicals at
the source, and.
Speaker 1: The technology to do that is getting better. There are
companies developing new types of filters specifically designed to capture
pfas from industrial wastewater before it ever gets into the environment.
Speaker 2: We probably can't ban all fourteen thousand PFAS chemicals overnight.
Are still essential for critical uses like medical implants or semiconductor, but.
Speaker 1: For consumer products, for packaging, for all the non essential uses,
we need to aggressively find safer alternatives.
Speaker 2: We have been here before, haven't we With lead and gasoline,
with asbestos, with free on and the ozone layer.
Speaker 1: In every case there was corporate denial and secrecy, but
eventually the science became undeniable, public pressure mounted and we
made a change.
Speaker 2: It feels like we're finally at that turning point with pfas.
The work of people like Rob Billett and the clear
science from these major studies has really shifted the conversation.
Speaker 1: And consumer awareness is a huge driver. When people understand
the risk, they demand safer products, they demand clean water,
and companies are forced to listen.
Speaker 2: We started this story with a search for a safe
chemical that accidentally led us down this incredibly dangerous path.
We now know that nearly every person on this planet
is contaminated.
Speaker 1: So we want to leave you with a question to ponder.
Given that these chemicals are here to stay for a
very long time and knowing the science behind how they
build up in our bodies from our environment. What small
steps do you feel are most critical, What should we
demand from manufacturers or what can we implement in our
own lives to manage this enduring chemical legacy.