Today, Explained - The forever chemicals in your blood

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

The Biden administration has new plans to reduce the amount of PFAS or “forever chemicals” in America’s drinking water. Barbara Moran, WBUR’s climate and environmental correspondent, explains why that will only get us so far. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Haleema Shah, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Forever chemicals are everywhere. Okay, so the big one is drinking water. You go into the bathroom, it can be in soap, shampoo, conditioner, hand lotion, dental floss. Which I hate because then it's in your teeth, right? Oh, they're in my teeth? Cosmetics are really bad. A lot of waterproof cosmetics, which is actually a deal breaker for a lot of women I talk to. The other big place is the kitchen.

Okay, nonstick cookware, takeout containers, your food really high in a lot of fish. And then in the living room, there might be like stain proofing on the carpet, stain proofing on the upholstery, in the dust bunnies. There'sery, in the dust bunnies. There's forever chemicals in the dust bunnies? Yeah.

And it's also in breast milk. Coming up on Today Explained, the Biden administration wants to do something about it. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM.

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from here with Barbara Moran. She's an environmental and climate correspondent at public radio station WBUR in Boston, which means she's been covering forever chemicals forever.

I asked her why we should cover them right now. So the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, finally came out with draft drinking water regulations last month. And that is a huge deal because drinking water is one of the main ways that people ingest PFAS chemicals. And the EPA is finally going to regulate it. The EPA's proposal applies to six of those chemicals known as PFAS compounds and would require water utilities to clean any detectable level out of their systems. So this is a huge announcement that came out in March. For people who don't know anything about forever chemicals or PFAS, what are they?

Okay, PFAS chemicals are these class of about thousands of chemicals that were invented in the 1930s. PFAS is an acronym for a family of man-made compounds called per- and polyfluoroalkali substances. And they turn out to have all these amazing properties, like they are heat-resistant and water-resistant and oil-resistant. So they're used in thousands of products, like stain-resistant carpeting. Even DuPont says it cannot rule out that Teflon-connected products, such as its StainMaster carpet treatment, give off the chemical. And water-resistant clothing and cosmetics.

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found more than three-quarters of waterproof mascara. Nearly two-thirds of foundations and liquid lipsticks they tested have high levels of PFAS chemicals. And Teflon pans. If Teflon gets hot enough, depends on what you're cooking or how long you leave the pot on the stove, it gives off fumes that can kill birds. And microwave popcorn bags. Microwavable popcorn is a classic for movie nights at home, but that greaseproof paper it comes in may actually have chemicals that are toxic to people and the environment. And that's according to the Food and Drug Administration. And all of these things that people use every day. Things like pizza boxes, paper plates, rain jackets, ski wax, even guitar strings.

So because they're so widely used and they've been used for so long, they're now everywhere. They're in water and air and soil. Yes. And our blood, I'm told? Yes, of 98. It's either 98 or 99% of Americans have some PFAS in their blood. Okay, so here's the thing that's interesting. When I hear that, I'm like, well, how bad can it be?

Because I'm not dying, I don't think. Same, I don't think. I don't think. So why is it so bad? So here's why it turns out PFAS chemicals are so bad. One, I don't think. I don't think. So why is it so bad? So here's why it turns out PFAS chemicals are so bad. One, they stick around forever. They are nearly indestructible. You just can't get rid of them. You can't get rid of them. Like most toxins you get in your body, they eventually go out. PFAS will stay in your body for years. And they have a structure that makes them affect almost every organ system in your body.

So they've been connected with all kinds of diseases like liver disease and kidney cancer and testicular cancer and immune problems and digestive problems and high cholesterol. Obesity, risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, a whole suite of health outcomes that we're quite concerned about are associated with exposures to these compounds. Why are they so bad? Why are they causing so many terrible things? Scientists are not 100% sure of the mechanism of how they do these things in the body. They kind of mimic certain other things that are good. So your body kind of lets them in and they disrupt all kinds of different functions in your body. But there's

a ton of research going on with that. They just know which organs and systems that they are hurting, but they're not exactly sure how. What the heck are these things doing in the tap water? Scientists with the Environmental Working Group in Washington have detected some amount of PFAS in groundwater or drinking water in nearly 2,800 American communities across 49 states. The contamination often linked to nearby industrial sites, landfills, airports, and military bases where the chemicals may have seeped into the ground. You have, say, waterproof clothing. You put them in your wash. Eventually, this stuff washes off or flakes off. It gets into the wastewater that goes out into the wastewater treatment plant, then it goes out into the world. You know, it washes off of things into stormwater. If you have it in your food, that can go into the drain. It's in sort

of landfill leachate. It's in firefighting foam. So anywhere there's a fire, it leaks out of the firefighting foam and gets into the groundwater. AFFF, aqueous film forming foam, is an unsurpassed way to stop a raging petroleum fire. For about 20 years, firefighters used it in training exercises. The foam is water and oil repellent thanks to perfluorinated chemicals, more commonly known as PFAS. So all of this stuff, eventually it all sort of leaks down

and gets into the groundwater, which ends up in the drinking water. And so this is how people first discovered it, in drinking water. This remains one is how people first discovered it in drinking water. This remains one of the main ways that people get exposed, especially if you live near somewhere like a firefighting academy where there's been a ton of this foam used, right? It's in your drinking water. That's why this EPA announcement is such a big deal that they're finally going to deal with it in drinking water because that's the first big enchilada that they have to deal with. Here I am drinking water, wondering. No, my drinking water is safe because

I check it because I'm obsessed. Oh, yeah. How do you check it? Well, Massachusetts, because we're ahead of the game here, we've regulated PFAS in drinking water for a few years now. And so you can go online if you live here in Massachusetts and look up your drinking water system to see if it's OK. That sounds great. I'm guessing not everyone has that opportunity. No, there's like a handful of states, maybe 10 or 12 that already regulate it. Those states are kind of ahead of the game and the federal government is finally catching up. So now all of the states are going to have to figure out how to measure it in their drinking water and regulate it. Tell me more about that. How did the federal government just decide, hey, maybe we should

pay attention to these forever chemicals that are in breast milk and the blood of our nation and small children and causing this raft of horrible calamities you talked about. Yeah. This is the big question is what took the EPA so long to finally regulate these things in drinking water? And there had been calls to do it for years and years and nothing happened under Trump. And then Biden came into office and said, yeah, we're moving ahead on PFAS. Everybody's sort of waiting, waiting, waiting. And then finally, the regulations came out in March. I mean, people knew years ago that these chemicals in drinking water were a problem, right? And all the states were kind of waiting around for the EPA to do something. And then some of the states were like, hell with this.

We're not waiting for the EPA. We're just going to do our own thing. What exactly did the EPA say in March? So the EPA said in March that they are going to regulate six PFAS chemicals in drinking water. When finalized, this proposed regulation will require public water systems to monitor these chemicals. It will also require systems to notify the public and reduce the levels of these PFAS as prescribed. So that means that if this regulation goes through as they're proposing, then every municipal water system in the country will have to measure these six PFAS chemicals and filter the water to get them out if they're in there. So that's good. They're doing something. But it's only six of these chemicals,

and there's like thousands of them. Thousands? Why just six? The six that the EPA is regulating are the ones that we know the most about. So there's enough evidence to know that these six should be regulated. Although a lot of scientists say, how about we regulate all of them and not just these six? So there's a lot of controversy over, you know, how to regulate these things, whether you should just look at a few that we know are bad or look at all of them, assuming that they're all bad. Well, be it six or, you know, a hundred or a thousand of them, how would the government then go about getting these forever chemicals out of the water if they're forever chemicals? You can filter them out of water. You know, you can use like a Gigunda filter.

This brand new water treatment facility in Mansfield filters PFAS, known as Forever Chemicals, out of the drinking water by sending it through a massive carbon filtration system. 40,000 pounds of carbon in each one of these vessels. The PFAS adheres to the carbon, so that's what removes the PFAS. They're really expensive, of course. But maybe worth it. Oh, it's totally worth it. You've got to get it out of the drinking water. Okay, everybody, get it out of your drinking water,

no matter what it costs. This has been a public service announcement. Yes. Yes. Get the chemicals out of the drinking water. Absolutely. From Barbara Moran, WBUR. You heard it here. Yes. The problem is then all the PFAS is stuck in the filter. Uh-huh. Then what? Then you either... Launch it into space. This is what everybody says to me about every single toxin.

They're like, can we just shoot it in the sun? And I'm like, what? No, you can't shoot it in the sun. Okay. It's our problem. We should keep the problems that we've created here on our polluted planet. Exactly. And then you have to put it in a landfill. But that doesn't get rid of the PFAS, really. You're still left the PFAS. The PFAS just keeps piling up and piling up and piling up.

Also, another PSA from Barb is that all this regulation does not help people with private wells, which are actually a lot, a huge percentage of people, especially in rural areas, you get your water from a private well, you have to go out and test your well by yourself. So go do it, even though it costs you money. Because you want to know. Oh. What have we done to ourselves, Barbara? What is this all for? Just so we can go out for a run and not get wet?

Just get wet. You know what? I'm glad that I'm bringing you into this level of despair that I have now felt for months. I've been here for a long time. I've been saying those exact words to myself. Like, what have we done? You know, I love Teflon. I guess.

And I like waterproof cosmetics and I love waterproof hiking gear. But yeah, you don't need to have toxic chemicals in everything. Back with Barb in a minute on Today Explained. Thank you. by Wirecutter. AuraFrames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because

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with something less toxic? Okay, so, well, this is part of the problem, right? Is the companies that make it, they're like, okay, we'll take out this bad stuff, but then they put in some other stuff. It's not really regulated. You're worried, are they just putting in another bad thing? The ultimate solution for all this

is better regulating chemicals before we put them out in the world, A. B, finding a way to actually destroy the stuff when we're done with it. And in the meantime, helping people limit their exposure to it, getting out of people's drinking water, helping people have safer products so that we're not exposed so much to these things. Do you know the history of how these things came to be? You know, they were invented in the 1930s. And now I want to tell you a chemical story. I'm Larry Livingston of the DuPont Company.

This story is about a new plastic material trademarked Teflon. So they invented these chemicals and they're amazing. They have these amazing qualities. This is very like the graduate, the future is plastics, plastics. Plastics. It is, totally. It's these people. There's a great future in plastics.

Absolutely. And they're like, woo, this is amazing. We could use it in this and we could use it in this and this and this and this. And it became most famous used by DuPont in products like Teflon. I think that was the one that most people were familiar with. Cookware never needs scouring. If it has DuPont, Teflon. And that's how it also came to light that they were toxic because of the factory where they're making Teflon when they had workers exposed to it. And also it got into the water there.

Everybody knows it's there. They know it's in the water, but nobody seems to know what to do about it. And now it's everywhere. When did companies really start to understand how bad these things were? So the companies knew that they were bad long, long before they told anybody about it. They knew it because some of the female workers had children with birth defects. These internal DuPont documents, only now made public, showed the company knew that of eight women working on the Teflon line in 1981, two had children with birth defects.

And they knew in animal tests that these chemicals had problems. And they kept this information quiet for a long time. And it eventually came out in lawsuits. When we got into the litigation with DuPont, we got access to a lot of the internal documents. And we found out that DuPont and another company called 3M had been studying this chemical dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. So how do companies respond to the information that, by the way, these forever chemicals that you're putting into every last product you make are really bad for people and cause a host of diseases and conditions that people are doing their darndest to avoid in regular life. Well, I think it goes the usual way.

First, they say, no, they're not. They're fine. What are you talking about? And then they say, OK, well, they're not as bad as you think. And then they're like, oh, OK, maybe some of them are bad, but not all of them. You know, and what they did was they phased out the first two best known ones. So they phased those out, but then they just replaced them with other ones that they said were better, but weren't really.

And 3M has said they're going to phase them out completely by 2025. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So that's big. And you're like, woohoo, 3M. But like scientists I talk to, they're like, woohoo, but are they actually just replacing them with some other thing? That could have some other unknown consequences. Exactly.

When do people learn about the negative effects of PFAS, if not right now on this show? Oh, God, they have to know by now. This is all I talk about. I would hope so I would not be surprised if people hear about this for the first time I mean let's see so I think it sort of first came to light

in around the late 90s early 2000s I would think a lot of people probably heard about it because there was a movie with Mark Ruffalo in it called Dark Waters how many did you lose? Hundred. Ninety.

A hundred and ninety cows. You tell me nothing's wrong here. Not a lot of people saw that movie despite the Hulk being in it. It's not my fault. The movie was made for you and me. I know. There's this one scene in the movie where the guy played by Mark Ruffalo basically has a total freakout

and starts getting rid of all the stuff in his house that has PFAS in it. And I'm like, yeah. Holy crap. Rob! What? I thought someone was breaking in, for God's sakes! No, it's just me. Rob, you need to tell me what in the hell's going on.

We're being poisoned. I'm that guy. I went around and threw away all our dental floss. But if you ripped up your house to take everything out of your house that had PFAS in it, it sounds like you'd have to kick yourself out of your house. I know. And your wife with the breast milk. I know. And your child who ate a dust bunny and now has them in their system.

It's not practical. I know. So then I had to say, okay, Barb, just sit down and take some deep breaths. Here's how I think about it to keep myself from freaking out. It's kind of like air pollution, right? If you live in the world, you're probably going to encounter air pollution, right? Yeah. Right?

Okay. Yeah. So what you want to do is you want to limit it. You don't want to go stand behind an exhaust pipe and suck in exhaust. Okay? Okay. Especially if you have asthma. So go for the big ticket items.

Make sure your drinking water is cleaned up. Make sure you do not microwave stuff in your takeout containers. That is scientifically proven to be bad. Yeah. There's often PFAS in takeout containers. So we got the water, we got the microwave. What else? Another big thing, you're not gonna like this one either, but if you do like recreational fishing or hunting, you should check the place where you're fishing to make sure it's okay. Like check the water streams, the water quality.

Yeah, and you can usually do that online. You should do this anyway because some places, a lot of places, now are saying you should not fish or take fish from certain places because of the PFAS. Fish is one of the highest PFAS-laden foods. So be careful with your fish. So like you're trying to eat less red meat because cows are so bad for the environment. So you start doing a fish-heavy diet and then you find out that, by the way, you're doomed there too. You're not doomed. Let's not go there. See, everybody's always telling me I'm the doom and gloom reporter because I'm the climate environment reporter. So let's not just do doom and gloom. Let's like empower ourselves.

But how worried are you right now about Dwayne The Rock Johnson, who eats something like 821 pounds of cod every year? I can confirm it to a certain degree that I was eating many pounds of food per day, including a lot of cod. He might be duped. I don't want to doom The Rock. I love The Rock. Let's not doom him. I'm a good guy, but sometimes I do bad things. This conversation with you, Barb, has been a wake-up call for me personally, maybe for some of our audience.

Is it realistic to try and live a PFAS-free life? Is it realistic to avoid these forever chemicals? And if we can't, is there a reason to despair? You cannot avoid them. You can't avoid them in the world we live in altogether, okay? But don't despair despair because you can cut your exposure way, way, way down by just going for the big ticket items. And the biggest ticket item is drinking water. And the federal government is finally doing something about it. So that is a huge amount of hope right there. But there have been previous administrations who have been all about disbanding the EPA.

Is the federal government doing something right now necessarily an indication that the federal government will be doing something in 10 years? It's really hard to roll back regulations.

Is it? Once you get them in place. Didn't Obama do a bunch of regulations and then his successor undid them all and now his successor is trying to put them back in place. Isn't it kind of how it goes? Cyclical? Almost, but not quite. Trump made a really strong effort to roll back a lot of regulations and had a little

bit of success, not a ton of success. Americans want safe drinking water. And so I think this one is going to stick. not a ton of success. Americans want safe drinking water. And so I think this one is going to stick. You know what that is, Barb? No. That's a glimmer of hope. Thank you.

I do like to likes a glimmer. So does Avishai Artsy. He produced this episode. We were edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Halima Shah and Laura Bullard, and mixed by Paul Robert Mounsey. The rest of the team at Today Explained is comprised of Hattie Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, Siona Petros, and Victoria Chamberlain. Lots of help from Jolie Myers and Patrick Boyd.

Music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Email us anytime at todayexplained at vox.com. We're on the radio with help from WNYC and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network you