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9359 |
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Date: April 19, 2016 at 21:13:23
From: mr bopp, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Teflon Toxin Contamination Has Spread Throughout the World |
URL: https://theintercept.com/2016/04/19/teflon-toxin-contamination-has-spread-throughout-the-world/ |
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science without consciousness...bah humbug...
IN RECENT MONTHS, PFOA, the perfluorinated chemical formerly used to make Teflon, has been making news again. Also known as C8, because of its eight-carbon molecule, PFOA has been found in drinking water in Hoosick Falls, New York; Bennington, Vermont; Flint, Michigan; and Warrington, Pennsylvania, among many other places across the United States. Although the chemical was developed and long manufactured in the United States, it’s not just an American problem. PFOA has spread throughout the world.
As in the U.S., PFOA has leached into the water near factories in Dordrecht, Holland, and Shimizu, Japan, both of which were built and operated for many years by DuPont. Last year, the Shimizu facility and part of the Dordrecht plant became the property of DuPont’s spinoff company, Chemours. Just as it did in both New Jersey and West Virginia, DuPont tracked the PFOA levels in its workers’ blood in Holland and Japan for years, according to EPA filings and internal company documents. Many of the blood levels were high, some extremely so. In one case, in Shimizu in 2008, a worker had a blood level of 8,370 parts per billion (ppb). In Dordrecht in 2005, another worker was recorded with 11,387 ppb. The national average in the U.S., in 2004, was about 5 ppb.
Water contamination was also a problem in both locations. In Shimizu, PFOA was detected in 10 wells at the site, with the highest level of contamination measuring 1,540 ppb. Groundwater in Dordrecht, which is about an hour south of Amsterdam, was also contaminated, with 1,374 ppb of PFOA at one spot near the factory in 2014.
But there has been little discussion of the problems at these two sites, at least until recently, when the PFOA contamination became news in Holland. In March, the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment released a report finding that levels of PFOA in water were elevated at least until 2002 and that residents of Dordrecht had been exposed to airborne PFOA for years.
In early April, a contingent from Keep Your Promises DuPont, an activist group representing residents of West Virginia and Ohio, traveled to the Netherlands and met with local politicians, scientists, Dordrecht residents, and the union representing workers at the plant.
“They’re pissed off,” said Paul Brooks, a physician from West Virginia who went to Holland and told people about the research that enabled epidemiologists to link PFOA to preeclampsia, ulcerative colitis, and two types of cancer, among other conditions. “They knew absolutely nothing about the links to disease, nothing,” said Brooks.
But the Dutch are learning quickly. On April 7, the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad announced the results of blood tests of two Dordrecht residents who had high blood levels of PFOA. One former DuPont worker had 28.3 ppb in his blood, while his wife, who didn’t work at the plant, had 83.6 ppb. In contrast, the blood level of Carla Bartlett, an Ohio resident who was awarded $1.6 million in the first of 3,500 cases against DuPont, was just 19 ppb in 2005.
Now at least 1,000 Dordrecht residents have requested testing, according to Ingrid de Groot, an investigative journalist for Algemeen Dagblad. De Groot said residents of Sliedrecht, a small town across the river from the Dordrecht, are also worried about airborne C8 contamination “because the wind 90 percent of the time blew in their direction from the Teflon plant.”
DuPont referred questions about its Dordrecht and Shimizu sites to Chemours, the company that has inherited its perfluorinated chemical (PFC) business, which now uses shorter-chain molecules. Chemours offered a statement saying that the area around the Shimizu site, which “was created decades ago” by DuPont and the Japanese company Mitsui, is “highly industrialized and the groundwater is brackish, and not a source of drinking water.” The statement also noted that PFOA has been used by a number of companies in Japan and that “Chemours has never used PFOA.”
Regarding Dordrecht, Chemours wrote that “there is no increased exposure of surrounding residents to PFOA via drinking water for the area surrounding the Dordrecht plant” and that the company “is confident that DuPont acted reasonably and responsibly during the years it used PFOA at Dordrecht, placing high priority on the health of its employees and the community. We believe DuPont went beyond what was required, and what other companies did, to manage PFOA in order to protect the health and safety of its workers and neighbors.” The statement also noted that by 2010, DuPont had reduced its PFOA emissions at the Dordrecht site by more than 90 percent of their level in 2000, and by 2012 the company had phased out the chemical entirely.
PFCGlobalContanimation-fin
Examples of PFC contamination drawn from scientific studies and public documents.
ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVE BEEN pushing to tamp down on the worldwide use of PFOA and PFOS, both of which have been detected all over the world, including in Germany, Canada, Greenland, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark’s Faroe Islands, France, Vietnam, South Africa, India, England, and Australia, where a governmental inquiry is underway. In 2014, PFOS was listed as one of the persistent organic pollutants to be phased out under the Stockholm Convention, the international treaty ratified by 179 countries (though not the U.S.). Last year, the EU proposed adding PFOA to the agreement.
But as some countries phase out the production of PFOS and PFOA, others are ramping it up. Perhaps the best example is China, where at least 56 companies produce PFCs, according to data collected by the Stockholm Convention. Without drinking water standards for PFOA and PFOS, or restrictions on their use, contamination is spiking there. A comparison of Chinese and European rivers published last year found that concentration of PFCs in the Xiaoqing River was more than 6,000 times higher than in the Scheur River, near DuPont’s Dordrecht plant. In a recent study, scientists tested the blood of fishery workers at Tangxun Lake in China’s Wuhan region. One employee was found to have the highest level of PFOS ever detected in human blood: 31,400 ppb.
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[9360] [9361] [9385] [9373] [9362] [9363] |
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9360 |
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Date: April 20, 2016 at 00:58:05
From: mr bopp, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Teflon Toxin Contamination Has Spread Throughout the World |
URL: https://theintercept.com/2016/03/03/new-teflon-toxin-causes-cancer-in-lab-animals/ |
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New Teflon Toxin Causes Cancer in Lab Animals
Sharon Lerner
2016-03-03T20:49:16+00:00
THE CHEMICAL INTRODUCED by DuPont in 2009 to replace the surfactant PFOA causes many of the same health problems in lab tests that the original chemical did, including cancer and reproductive problems, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. PFOA, also known as C8, was a key ingredient in Teflon.
C8 was originally manufactured by 3M, then by DuPont, and was phased out after a massive class-action lawsuit revealed evidence of its health hazards. The new chemical, sold under the name GenX, is used to make Teflon and many other products. While touting GenX as having a “more favorable toxicological profile” than C8, DuPont filed 16 reports of “substantial risk of injury to health or the environment” about its new chemical. The reports, discovered in the course of an investigation by The Intercept, were filed under Section 8 (e) of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and submitted to the EPA between April 2006 and January 2013. They cite numerous health effects in animals, including changes in the size and weight of animals’ livers and kidneys, alterations to their immune responses and cholesterol levels, weight gain, reproductive problems, and cancer.
“It’s the same constellation of effects you see with PFOA,” said Deborah Rice, a retired toxicologist who served as a senior risk assessor in the National Center for Environmental Assessment at the EPA. “There’s no way you can call this a safe substitute.”
Cancerous Tumors, Kidney Disease, and Uterine Polyps
In one experiment, rats given various amounts of GenX over two years developed cancerous tumors in the liver, pancreas, and testicles, according to a report DuPont submitted in January 2013. In addition to the cancers, some of the GenX-exposed rats in that experiment also developed benign tumors, as well as well as kidney disease, liver degeneration, and uterine polyps.
Satheesh Anand, a DuPont senior research toxicologist who signed the report, concluded that “these tumor findings are not considered relevant for human risk assessment.” Anand dismissed the significance of the results in part by emphasizing that the mechanism associated with the tumor formation in rats might not be the same in humans. DuPont scientists have long made the very same claim about C8 (as in this study from 2004), which caused testicular tumors in DuPont experiments on lab animals before it was linked to testicular cancer in exposed people.
Alan Ducatman, a physician who studies the health effects of perfluorinated chemicals such as C8 and GenX, characterized Anand’s claim as “a partial argument that could be interesting only to those who are not strongly following the literature.” Ducatman, who teaches environmental health sciences at the West Virginia University School of Public Health, is one of several researchers familiar with the health effects of C8 who reviewed the documents for The Intercept. He summarized DuPont’s interpretation of its own data as “cherry picking,” highlighting “species differences only when arguing that a problematic study finding is not relevant.”
DuPont’s reporting on the hazards of GenX “all has an eerie echo,” Ducatman wrote in an email to The Intercept. He noted that the reports show the chemical has the same trio of biological effects — on the liver, immunity, and the processing of fats — seen with similar chemicals, including C8. “This reminds me a lot of a path we have recently traveled. That journey is not ending well.”
Despite the fact that Section 8(e) reports are required only when companies have evidence that their product presents a substantial risk, the summaries of the experiments written by DuPont employees downplay most of their findings.
“There’s a lot of hand-waving sentences, ‘Yeah, this happened, but we don’t think it’s relevant,’” said Rice, the former EPA toxicologist. In one study conducted on rats and mice, for instance, male rats given any dose of GenX had changes in their cholesterol levels, and some also had changes in levels of two blood proteins. But the report, which like many of the others was labeled “Company Sanitized,” simply concluded that “these changes were of uncertain relationship to treatment and considered non-adverse.” It’s impossible for independent reviewers to evaluate these claims because the reports don’t include the data on which they’re based.
As The Intercept reported in August, DuPont scientists in the 1970s chose not to report abnormal liver test results in workers exposed to C8. In a 2004 deposition, the company’s medical director said that the company had not reported the findings because the liver changes weren’t proven to be problematic health effects related to the chemical. In its filings on GenX, DuPont scientists did report increases in the weights of kidneys and livers, and other changes in liver cells, in rats exposed to the chemical, but they again downplayed the results, saying that these changes were “not considered adverse,” according to a July 2010 letter signed by A. Michael Kaplan, DuPont’s former director of regulatory affairs.
Rice took issue with the judgment that such changes won’t cause problems in humans. “These are well-nourished, homogenous animals,” Rice said of the lab rats. “The human population isn’t like that. When you push these things around, you’re going to push some people into disease states.”
Reproductive Effects
GenX also affected reproduction in lab animals, according to the reports. Rats exposed to higher amounts of the chemical were more likely to give birth early and have babies that weighed less. Another study showed that female rats exposed to GenX reached puberty later than the unexposed animals.
While the company also dismissed the significance of many of these effects in the summaries of its experiments, the findings are “suggestive of a reproductive effect,” said Laura Vandenberg, a reproductive biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Vandenberg said that the tests described in the reports can’t fully show the extent of the chemical’s reproductive activity because they only look at the effects of very high doses of GenX.
“That might make sense if what we were worried about was whether this chemical maims or kills you outright,” said Vandenberg. “But that’s not what we’re seeing. People don’t cook on Teflon and drop dead. These are chemicals that interfere with normal biological functions at low doses and contribute to disease.” Because hormones act at low doses, “you have to study them at low doses.”
The DuPont studies estimated the lethal dose of GenX in rats as 7500 mg/kg. At such doses or higher, the animals “died within approximately 3 hours of dosing and exhibited discomfort, gasping and/or tonic convulsions prior to death,” according to one report submitted in 2006.
While all the scientists The Intercept asked to review the reports agreed that the issues they raised demanded multiple additional investigations, the EPA did not require any further testing of GenX.
Some of the reports reference a consent order for GenX, a document the EPA issued in 2009, which The Intercept obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. That document lays out the agency’s many concerns about DuPont’s C8 replacement, including evidence that the chemical and its salt are toxic to lab animals and cause mutations in mammalian and human cells. The document also lays out concerns that the molecules “will persist in the environment, could bioaccumulate, and be toxic to people, wild mammals, and birds”; that “there is high concern for possible environmental effects over the long-term”; and that “EPA has human health concerns.”
Such orders are issued when the EPA requires more information in order to evaluate a new chemical’s safety. Although the DuPont studies show many significant findings and clearly raise questions about the health and developmental effects of GenX, the lack of a strong regulatory response to them isn’t unusual, according to one EPA official.
“A lot of them do just get filed away,” Vincent Cogliano, director of the Integrated Risk Information System at the EPA, acknowledged of studies industry submits to the agency.
The EPA has a number of options once it has evidence that a chemical is hazardous. The agency could use its statutory authority to regulate the chemical, setting limits on its use or even banning it and requiring companies to clean up contaminated areas. While the EPA has yet to take any of those actions on C8, which has been shown to be hazardous over the past decade, it has added that chemical to the list of substances regularly monitored in drinking water.
The EPA could also add GenX to that list, but such efforts are often met with resistance from industry. “Companies fight them,” Cogliano said, “and bring in other scientists who debunk the studies that show there are health hazards.”
For now, GenX is neither regulated nor tracked, even as Chemours (the chemical company spun off by DuPont in July 2015) produces the chemical and releases it into the environment in undisclosed amounts. Chemours declined to reveal production quantities for GenX, but said that emissions are 1 percent or less of the quantities used. Yet according to one of the hazard reports DuPont sent the EPA in March 2010, “The biodegradation of the test substance was 0%.” So GenX, like C8, is likely to be with us forever.
In response to inquiries from The Intercept, DuPont declined to comment, noting that GenX is now a product of Chemours.
Chemours responded with the following statement:
Chemours was created in July 2015 through the spin-off of the DuPont Performance Chemicals unit, which included the fluoropolymers business. Before this, in 2013, DuPont stopped making or using PFOA, replacing it with a new polymerization aid for use in the manufacture of fluoropolymers.
Extensive health safety testing was conducted on the new polymerization aid, and the data has been shared with regulatory agencies around the world as well as published in peer-reviewed scientific publications. The full body of testing data indicates that the polymerization aid can be used safely in the manufacture of fluoropolymers. It is rapidly eliminated from the body with low bioaccumulation potential. It has low acute toxicity in mammalian and aquatic testing, low repeated-dose toxicity in mammalian testing, and is not a skin sensitizer. Data suggests that it is not a developmental, reproductive, or genetic toxicant, or a human carcinogen. In addition, the new chemistry is used in conjunction with environmental exposure control technologies that reduce potential for environmental release and exposure.
Studies to evaluate chemical safety are designed to find health effects through the use of very high doses, in order to establish acceptable exposure limits with appropriate margins of safety. Therefore, finding such effects is important in effectively managing chemical safety. The level of potential worker or public exposure to this chemical is orders of magnitude below the levels at which any effects have been seen in our testing.
Regulatory authorities in the U.S., Europe, China, Japan and Taiwan have reviewed the testing data on our new polymerization aid and have given permission for its manufacture and use.
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[9361] [9385] [9373] [9362] [9363] |
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9361 |
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Date: April 21, 2016 at 06:00:35
From: grzbear/AZ, [DNS_Address]
Subject: fluoride... |
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among other things.
in the 1990's through the early 2000's I raised a few waterslagger canary's...
beautiful song birds...
on owner forums (news feed groups before internet groups) people would talk about finding the birds dead for no apparent reason. Turned out the one common thread was cooking with teflon pans at medium to high heat - the off gas from the teflon was killing them - boom dead.
never buy a non-stick pan - you are asking for health problems.
too bad man never pays attention to the warning signs until after the damage is done.
grz-
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9385 |
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Date: May 12, 2016 at 19:51:41
From: Candace/Denver, [DNS_Address]
Subject: teflon pans |
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I got rid of the ONE I bought way back when as I can
taste the teflon and other coatings. I use stainless
steel pots and cast iron skillets. 3 or 4 years ago I
had dinner at families house and the chicken was cooked
in teflon and I could not understand WHY they could not
taste it.
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9373 |
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Date: May 05, 2016 at 09:40:41
From: trapper/austin, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: fluoride... |
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my wagner cast iron is slicker than slick and stick with it.
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9362 |
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Date: April 22, 2016 at 15:38:14
From: Terra11, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: fluoride... I never had a clue Teflon was SUPPOSED TO BE SAFER(NT) |
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Responses:
[9363] |
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9363 |
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Date: April 23, 2016 at 09:59:28
From: grzbear/AZ, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Chemical Weapons and/or their Precursors |
URL: https://www.fluoridealert.org/wp-content/pesticides/effects.chem.weapon.precurs.htm |
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BTW check out farm chemicals too... we spray chemical weapons on our food...
yes... that will end well won't it?
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