This is a very good read. Reminds me some of my own experiences working in a toxic environment. Though in my case it wasn't about chemicals but the product I worked on was intentionally being run into the ground for political reasons that are still somewhat obscure to me.<p>It's a horrible experience; the constant gaslighting grinds you down.<p>I can especially relate to the idea of being paid to do something that nobody in the company actually wants you to do. The better you are at your job, the more they hate you.<p>I wouldn't be surprised if they actually wanted her to fail. I bet if she had lied and started reporting that there were no PFOS and made up some BS that the old methods of testing were arcane and her new (intentionally flawed) method is better, they would have given her a huge raise and she would have been made employee of the year.<p>That's the kind of stuff that happened at my previous employer. All the liars and saboteurs at that company ended up being promoted within the company or hired by other companies with big salaries to help them run projects into the ground; which they did diligently.
Just finished watching Dark Waters, which is about the DuPont PFOAs in Teflon case. It's an insane story and hard to believe they can get away with intentionally and knowingly poisoning nearly every living thing for decades, and when caught are allowed to not just still exist as a company, but continue to poison us.
Related anecdote: I know someone who used to work in Oakdale, Minnesota, a town that 3M literally used as a PFAS dumping ground. I'm not saying it's normal for a kid to die of cancer at the local high school, I'm just saying it happens more often there than anywhere else I've ever heard of.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_Contamination_of_Minnesota_Groundwater" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_Contamination_of_Minnesot...</a>
> <i>In the middle of this testing, Johnson suddenly announced that he would be taking early retirement. [...] Johnson had always guided her research, and he hadn’t told Hansen what she should do next.</i><p>Though it's implied that Johnson's leaving is connected to the PFOS revelation, I don't see the article indicating whether Johnson had told Hansen anything more about it.<p>(Such as discussions behind closed doors, ultimatums, his own disillusionment/despair, etc.)
This leaves me wondering how many biomedical implants might have things like this in them which might be leaching into our bloodstream and thus bodies over time.
Long read, but definitely worth it imho.<p>It's fascinating how that famous Upton Sinclair quote about it being "difficult to convince a person of something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it" (paraphrased) plays out with two different people in different ways. One who has convinced herself for a long time that it's not dangerous to humans, the other who sees himself as a "loyal soldier", and doesn't want to create liabilities for the company.
It seems like once a week I get reminded how critical making sure that employees are safe to speak their mind, *especially* when the company's revenue or profits are concerned with what they want to say. So many times I've seen horrific situations be diffused when someone said something, and management didn't retaliate or try to silence the employee.
These 'forever chemicals' are slowly regulated/banned across in many countries. Is anyone aware of some kind of map/data on the subject?
It's amazing that as long as it isn't "easy to get on camera" corporations can do harm for decades with no penalty. Just imagine if instead your Teflon frying pan were to emit a cloud of yellow gas that makes your throat bleed just a tiny bit every time you use the pan - would have been addressed back in the '70s.
I live in the UK and PFOAs have showed up in testing around the area we live in. At 14.5ng/l, they already exceed the safety level in US and EU, 10ng/l. However the threshold level in water in the UK is 100ng/l so :politician-shrugging:
So, what next? Without the ability to identify a hazard, I cannot make a meaningful change. This is very clearly not saying "all plastics" but instead "this plastic". That's a start... but how can I tell?
Honest question, people keep hyping about these "forever chemicals" but the hype seems to be around the fact that they're "forever" rather than what the effects actually are. I hear tons of people talking about them, but never any discussion of anyone actually harmed. It kind of reminds me of the conspiracy around Glyphosate and the efforts to demonize Monsanto, eventually resulting in the company being sold to non-US company Bayer, even though no human damage was ever proven. This seems to be a repeated pattern in recent years toward old and storied US companies.<p>They just seem to really heavily play into people's luddite-based fears and lack of understanding.
This is nothing new. This strategy, developed by Big Tobacco is used over and over again.<p>Steps:<p>(1) Say it is beneficial to health (there are always doctors in ads)<p>(2) When 1 is disproven, deny it (make it a lifestyle thing, expand into more demographics, there was a recent comment/post how there was an ad guy who convinced women to smoke with the right marketing)<p>(3) Also deny that workers who are exposed more are getting sick, they didn't follow proper procedures, etc. Its the workers fault!<p>(4) Keep the controversy alive (this will run for 3 - 5 decades), the science is not settled, etc.<p>(5) If we don't have this, it will stop industrial/economic progress.<p>(6) It is unfair to ban this until definitive proof exists.Further tests and studies required.<p>This playbook is used by all industries.<p>This is a really good summary of some of the strategies employed by Lead: <a href="https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.75.4.344" rel="nofollow">https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.75.4....</a><p>Bureau of Mines released its preliminary findings on the
possible dangers of leaded gasoline to the general public.
The New York Times headline summed up the report:
"No Peril to Public Seen in Ethyl Gas/ Bureau of Mines
Reports after Long Experiments with Motor Exhausts/ More
Deaths Unlikely."<p>"Dr. Henry F. Vaughan, president of the American
Public Health Association, said that such evidence did not
exist. "Certainly in a study of the statistics in our large cities
there is nothing which would warrant a health commissioner
in saying that you could not sell ethyl gasoline," he pointed
out. Vaughan acknowledged that there should be further
tests and studies of the problem but that "so far as the
present situation is concerned, as a health administrator I
feel that it is entirely negative." Emery Hayhurst also
argued this point at the Surgeon General's Conference,
maintaining that the widespread use of leaded gasoline for 27
months "should have sufficed to bring out some mishaps and
poisonings, suspected to have been caused by tetraethyl
lead.'"<p>Lead is a gift of God: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2023/jan/12/the-gift-of-god-that-has-poisoned-american-kids-for-100-years" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2023/jan/12/the-gi...</a><p>How gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37917235">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37917235</a><p>Tobacco: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Indoor_Air_Research" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Indoor_Air_Research</a>
What's interesting is thinking about what (if any) parallels of "PFOS" exist in the tech industry - collective delusions of products that aren't harmful. I would vote for most social media apps, maybe?
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The corporate veil needs to be not only eliminated, but reversed<p>If a corporation is a collection of people driven by a charter, and that corporation commits a crime, the people who drove that decisions have two forms of protection from liability. One, criminal liability is in effect treated as diffuse and it is near impossible to charge any person for a crime. Two, assets not associated with the company are protected from liability involving the company's actions<p>This is madness. When a collective of any kind commits a crime, this is conspiracy. If someone is a voting shareholder or board member or top-level executive of a company that did a crime, they should automatically be liable. Executives should be resigning out of fear of being held responsible when given an unjust order. In the current environment, everyone involved is heavily tilted toward continuing to harm people for profit, because no consequences besides being lambasted in the media (If someone dares do journalism, in an environment where oligarchs punish and discourage exposes by buying up news orgs and socially discrediting all criticism as "cancel culture", and seemingly will outright murder whistleblowers in their own organizations), but heavy consequences can be inflicted on them by the explicitly authoritarian hierarchies within the corporations themselves and the outsized influence on your entire career prospects that defying someone in a position of power in a concentrated industry (which is at this point most if not all industries) can have should you choose your ethics over their marching orders<p>Not only should no one have this much power, ever, for any reason, but we have cleanly separated power from responsibility of any kind. This has never been conducive to a functional society, and it will continue to get worse as long as this structure remains intact
They lie to Us.<p>They spy on us.<p>They poison us.<p>Why does 3M still exist? Their company charter should be revoked. Their assets should be stripped and sold. Every employee fired. Everyone complicit should be in a prison cell. Every single one of them.
PFOA/PFOS propaganda is wild. They're very useful substances. Yes, acute exposures cause harm, but the same can be said of salt. Though with modern instrumentation we can measure presence in parts per trillion, I have seen no evidence at all that likely bioaccumulative pathways have resulted in harm to humans. Even the opening of this article levers "we found it" with "EPA regulates it in drinking water" as self-evident that it's some kind of super poison. But it's not. Frankly, it's not always even clear what "it" is as there are thousands of different compounds, many of which people consume daily (e.g., flonase, prozac, etc). The health alarm around these substances is just astounding to me.
So, PFOS PFOA PF* is bad, because it cannot be excreted by the body (except to your children, if you’re female and pregnant?) and is bio accumulative<p>But! Fluoride and tritium are A-ok ?
I don't understand why these companies even do these analyses . It has been proven over and over again that they are pointless, whatever the outcomes, the results are going to be ignored in the name of profits. I think that these companies should be obliged to subsidise independent, reviewable and verifiable research, for example from Universities or government run labs.<p>I get, secrecy, and I am OK if some details, for example about production and formulas, may be made available only under NDAs, but that's as much as that. The rest, especially health effects, should be under public scrutiny.
> Her father was one of the company’s star engineers and was even inducted into its hall of fame in 1979; he had helped to create Scotch-Brite scouring pads and Coban wrap, a soft alternative to sticky bandages. Once, he molded some fibers into cups, thinking that they might make a good bra. They turned out to be miserably uncomfortable, so he and his colleagues placed them over their mouths, giving the company the inspiration for its signature N95 mask.<p>Just a little reminder about forever chemicals in N95 masks: <a href="https://www.eenews.net/articles/pfas-are-in-face-masks-should-you-be-concerned/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eenews.net/articles/pfas-are-in-face-masks-shoul...</a><p>One of these days, once all the people involved have profited and died, we will then know the true impact of the COVID lockdowns.