Taking a page directly from the big tobacco playbook, the chemical industry has deliberately suppressed “public awareness of the toxicity of PFAS and, in turn, delayed regulations governing their use.” According to a new study published in the June 2, 2023 issue of Annals of Public Health, ”Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are now ubiquitous in the population and environment. Consumer awareness can advance calls for safer products by demanding publicly available studies of harm.”
The study authors, Nadia Gaber, Lisa Bero and Tracey J. Woodruff, examine “previously secret documents held by DuPont and 3M, the largest manufacturers of PFAS…and show how the chemical industry used the tactics of the tobacco industry to delay public awareness of the toxicity of PFAS and, in turn, delayed regulations governing their use. PFAS are now ubiquitous in the population and environment. Consumer awareness can advance calls for safer products by demanding publicly available studies of harm. Public pressure can also influence legislators to pass more health-protective environmental and chemical regulations.”
……
The study’s Background information is cited here in full:
“Per- and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals (PFAS) have unique chemical properties that impart oil and water repellency, temperature resistance, and friction reduction. As such, they have been used in a wide range of commercial applications since the 1940s—including non-stick cookware, fabric treatment, and food packaging—as well as military and industrial uses, particularly in insulation and fire suppressants [1]. PFAS chemical properties also make them highly resistant to degradation, both in the environment and in human bodies, and they have been found in multiple environmental media globally and measured in populations in the U.S., Europe, and China [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Exposures continue after phaseouts; in the U.S. over 90% of pregnant women are still exposed to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) [7] despite PFOS being phased out of production and use in 2002, and, by the end of 2015, U.S. manufacturers had eliminated PFOA emissions and product content [8].
Two of the 12,034 known PFAS variants, PFOS and PFOA [9] (formerly known as C8), have been shown to adversely impact a range of health outcomes [1, 10, 11, 12]. Two major companies in the U.S. have manufactured the majority of legacy and emerging PFAS: 3M, makers of Scotchguard, and E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, known as DuPont, makers of Teflon. PFAS were long presumed to be biologically inert [13], but legal disclosures and investigative reporting have uncovered evidence that companies that manufacture PFAS learned of their toxic effects on human health and the environment long before the public health community. Chemours’ website still claims PTFE is “inert to virtually all chemicals and considered the most slippery material in existence [14].” An initial lawsuit filed in 1998 (Tennant v. E.I. du Pont de Nemours &
Company) ended in settlement in 2001, establishing that DuPont dumped more than 7,100 tons of PFOA-laced sludge onto Plaintiff Tenant’s property and the Ohio River, where the chemical seeped into the ground and entered the Ohio River and local water sources [15]. Legal discovery in Tennant showed that DuPont and 3M had evidence of clear health and environmental impacts as early as 1976 [15]. Based on this evidence, in 2004, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pursued DuPont for violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Section 8(e), which requires companies to report substantial risks about chemicals they manufacture, process, or commercially distribute, for failure to disclose their findings regarding PFOA, claiming the company “knew or should have known” that these compounds were toxic. The resulting settlement of $10.25 million plus $6.2 million for supplemental environmental projects was the largest civil penalty ever obtained in the U.S. under environmental statues at that time [16]. This is less than 2% of the $1 billion per year in revenues from PFOA or C8 that DuPont disclosed in its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing in 2005 [17]. A nationwide toxic tort case was filed in 2018 by ten U.S. states against manufacturers, including 3M and DuPont, on behalf of U.S. residents who were exposed to PFAS. If the class is certified, it will become the largest class action case in U.S. history [18, 19].
Human harm, including pregnancy-induced hypertension, kidney and testicular cancers, and ulcerative colitis, from PFOA was not publicly established until 2011, following the reports of the C8 Science Panel, mandated and funded as part of a settlement agreement in the case of Jack W. Leach, et al. v. E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company (no. 01-C-608 W.Va., Wood County Circuit Court, filed 10 April 2002) [15, 19, 20, 21]. Personal injury claims resulting from the findings have totaled $670.7 million for more than 3,500 people to date [22].
In addition to the findings of the C8 Science Panel, systematic reviews show that there is sufficient evidence that developmental exposure to PFOA restricts fetal growth [23], associated with dyslipidemia (a risk factor for adverse cardiovascular effects) [12], and poses “an immune hazard” to humans, including impaired vaccine response [24]. There is also growing evidence suggestive of impacts on human reproduction and development—including infertility, premature birth, trouble breastfeeding, delayed puberty, earlier menopause, and diverse metabolic impacts [25, 26]—as well as suggestions of a relationship with neurologic and behavioral disorders (including attention deficit hyperactivity [ADHD], autism, and schizophrenia) [27, 28].
There are no consistent approaches to regulating exposures to PFAS globally. For example, no federal enforceable limits on any PFAS chemicals have been established in the U.S. In 2016 EPA issued a non-enforceable lifetime Health Advisory for exposure to PFOA and PFOS in drinking water of 70 parts per trillion [26]. As of November 2015, the approximate safe level of PFOA in water systems was exceeded by factors of 100 or more in 27 U.S. states [29, 30]. EPA announced a proposed National Primary Drinking Water Regulation (NPDWR) for six PFAS including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) in 2023 [31]. Monitoring of PFAS in drinking water systems remains elusive, however, because a national program to test for them ended in 2015, and even then, tested for only a few types of the thousands of chemicals, requiring only systems that serve more than 10,000 people to report only if levels exceed the threshold level. Subsequent testing has found PFAS is widely present in U.S. drinking water, as well as groundwater and rainwater [32, 33]. Independent scientists argue that even this figure is too high to be health-protective and have suggested a limit of 1 ppt [34]. In light of this evidence, and ongoing research, there has been an increase in regulatory oversight and legal intervention into the use and disposal of PFAS in the United States. In December 2019, under the National Defense Authorization Act, 172 per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances were added to the federal Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), requiring monitoring of chemicals that are known to cause serious human health and/or environmental harm [35]. On June 15, 2022, EPA issued interim updated drinking water health advisories for PFOA and PFOS that reduced those EPA issued in 2016 to 0.004 and 0.020 ppt, respectively [36]. Some states in the U.S. and a few select countries globally have banned PFAS in food contact materials, paper and paper food packaging, and firefighting foam [4]. There are current efforts toward developing improved methods for measuring total PFAS in certain media [4].
Previous studies of the tobacco, food, pharmaceutical and chemical industries show that industry’s influence on the design, conduct, and dissemination of research plays a strong role in shaping public health knowledge about harmful products and determining product safety standards, particularly in the U.S. market [13, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42]. These industries have been shown to share strategies for manipulating scientific information in order to maximize their profits. [BGA emphasis] Much of the evidence about corporate manipulation of comes from analysis of previously secret industry documents that have been released through litigation [37]. This influence, and its distorting effects on public health science, is increasingly considered a major etiology of disease, particularly in advanced industrial societies [43, 44, 45]. A growing body of literature describes it as part of the commercial determinants of health [43, 44, 45].
In this paper, we analyze previously secret industry documents to: 1) examine what chemical manufacturers knew about PFAS and their effects on human health and 2) establish when they knew it in comparison to public knowledge of their health effects. We also analyze the strategies used to manipulate the science narrative. We hypothesize that, similar to the tobacco and other industries, the two largest manufacturers of PFAS, DuPont (makers of Teflon) and 3M (makers of Scotchguard), were aware of the hazards of PFAS long before the public health community and used some of the same strategies that other industries have used to sustain doubt about the dangers of their products [42]. Our review of this small collection provides a solid framework on which scholars can build as more documents and data become available. To our knowledge, this is the first use of chemical industry documents in a scholarly evaluation of the influence of the chemical industry on PFAS science and regulation.”
