Makers of PFAS “Forever Chemicals” Covered Up the Dangers
By UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SAN
FRANCISCO
A new paper published on June 1, 2023, in Annals of Global Health, examines documents from DuPont and 3M, the largest manufacturers of PFAS, and analyzes the tactics industry used to delay public awareness of PFAS toxicity and, in turn, delay regulations governing their use.
PFAS are widely used chemicals in clothing, household
goods, and food products, and are highly resistant to breaking down, giving
them the name “forever chemicals.” They are now ubiquitous in people and the
environment.
“These documents reveal clear evidence that
the chemical industry knew about the dangers of PFAS and failed to let the
public, regulators, and even their own employees know the risks,” said Tracey
J. Woodruff, PhD, professor and director of the UCSF Program on Reproductive
Health and the Environment (PRHE), a former senior scientist and policy advisor
at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and senior author of the paper.
This is the first time these PFAS industry
documents have been analyzed by scientists using methods designed to expose
tobacco industry tactics.
Adverse Effects Had Been Known for Decades
The secret industry documents were discovered
in a lawsuit filed by attorney Robert Bilott, who was the first to successfully
sue DuPont for PFAS contamination and whose story was featured in the film,
“Dark Waters.” Bilott gave the documents, which span 45 years from 1961 to
2006, to producers of the documentary, “The Devil We Know,” who donated them to
the UCSF Chemical Industry Documents Library.
“Having access to these documents allows us to see what the manufacturers knew and when, but also how polluting industries keep critical public health information private,” said first author Nadia Gaber, MD, PhD, who led the research as a PRHE fellow and is now an emergency medicine resident. “This research is important to inform policy and move us towards a precautionary rather than reactionary principle of chemical regulation.”
Little was publicly known about the toxicity
of PFAS for the first 50 years of their use, the authors stated in the
paper, The Devil They Knew: Chemical Documents Analysis of Industry
Influence on PFAS Science, despite the fact that “industry had
multiple studies showing adverse health effects at least 21 years before they
were reported in public findings.”
The paper states that, “DuPont had evidence
of PFAS toxicity from internal animal and occupational studies that they did
not publish in the scientific literature and failed to report their findings to
EPA as required under TSCA. These documents were all marked as ‘confidential,’
and in some cases, industry executives are explicit that they ‘wanted this memo
destroyed.’”
Suppressing Information to Protect a Product
The paper documents a timeline of what
industry knew versus public knowledge and analyzes strategies the chemical
industry used to suppress information or protect their harmful products.
Examples include:
As early as 1961, according to a company
report, Teflon’s Chief of Toxicology discovered that Teflon materials had “the
ability to increase the size of the liver of rats at low doses,” and advised
that the chemicals “be handled ‘with extreme care’ and that ‘contact with the
skin should be strictly avoided.’”
According to a 1970 internal memo,
DuPont-funded Haskell Laboratory found C8 (one of thousands of PFAS) to be
“highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested.” And in a 1979
private report for DuPont, Haskell labs found that dogs who were exposed to a
single dose of PFOA “died two days after ingestion.”
In 1980, DuPont and 3M learned that two of
eight pregnant employees who had worked in C8 manufacturing gave birth to
children with birth defects. The company did not publish the discovery or tell
employees about it, and the following year an internal memo stated, “We know of
no evidence of birth defects caused by C-8 at DuPont.”
Despite these and more examples, DuPont
reassured its employees in 1980 that C8, “has a lower toxicity, like table
salt.” Referring to reports of PFAS groundwater contamination near one of
DuPont’s manufacturing plants, a 1991 press release claimed, “C-8 has no known
toxic or ill health effects in humans at concentration levels detected.”
As media attention to PFAS contamination
increased following lawsuits in 1998 and 2002, DuPont emailed the EPA asking,
“We need EPA to quickly (like first thing tomorrow) say the following: That
consumer products sold under the Teflon brand are safe and to date there are no
human health effects known to be caused by PFOA.”
In 2004, the EPA fined DuPont for not
disclosing their findings on PFOA. The $16.45 million settlement was the
largest civil penalty obtained under U.S. environmental statutes at the time.
But it was still just a small fraction of DuPont’s $1 billion annual revenues
from PFOA and C8 in 2005.
“As many countries pursue legal and
legislative action to curb PFAS production, we hope they are aided by the
timeline of evidence presented in this paper,” said Woodruff. “This timeline
reveals serious failures in the way the U.S. currently regulates harmful
chemicals.”
Reference: “The Devil they Knew: Chemical
Documents Analysis of Industry Influence on PFAS Science” by Nadia Gaber, Lisa
Bero and Tracey J. Woodruff, 1 June 2023, Annals of Global Health.
DOI: 10.5334/aogh.4013
