PFAS: Sources, treatments, and health effects

[00:00:23]

ELENA RENKEN: Hi, everyone, and welcome to SciLine’s media briefing on PFAS or forever chemicals. In light of recent federal and local changes in PFAS regulation and with PFAS pollution found in so many U.S. Communities, we’ll cover the basics about where PFAS comes from, links to health consequences, and what solutions work to mitigate PFAS pollution. I’m Elena Renken, SciLine’s Manager of Journalism Projects and Multimedia. Here at SciLine we aim to make it as easy as possible for reporters like yourselves to make use of scientific evidence in your stories, whether that’s on a topic like PFAS or in a story where the science angle is less obvious, like in coverage of local politics or immigration news.

And SciLine is a philanthropically funded, editorially independent nonprofit based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and all our services for journalists are free. You can find more of our resources to assist with covering current issues on our website at SciLine.org. If you’re working on a story that could use some context from an expert, you can click the blue I Need an Expert button on our website, and we’ll look for a scientific source with the right research background who’s available to speak with you before your deadline.

I also wanted to mention the program EPI Center, which is also based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and communicates scientific research to policymakers. They have a range of resources on PFAS available at epicenter.org. Before we start, I wanted to give our three panelists a chance to introduce themselves and their areas of research. Dr. Ng, would you go first?

[00:02:08]

CARLA NG: Sure, and thanks to SciLine for asking me to participate in this. My name is Carla Ng. I’m an associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, where my group mostly works on understanding how PFAS get into human bodies and wildlife.

[00:02:24]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. And Dr. Varshavsky, would you go ahead.

[00:02:28]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: Yes. Hi. Thank you. So I’m an assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and I study how environmental exposures, including environmental chemicals like PFAS affect human health and development.

[00:02:45]

ELENA RENKEN: Great. And Dr. Cordner?

[00:02:48]

ALISSA CORDNER: Thank you. It’s great to be here. I’m Alissa Cordner. I’m a professor of sociology at Whitman College in Eastern Washington State, and I’m the co-director of the PFAS Project Lab, which is an interdisciplinary research group that’s been working for over ten years to study the intersection of social science and environmental health science questions around PFAS.

[00:03:11]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you all. Now I’m going to have a brief conversation with each of our panelists before we start to take questions from the audience here. But we’ll be gathering those questions throughout the briefing, so, journalists, submit them anytime by clicking the Q&A icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen, and make sure to let us know if you’d like your question directed to any specific speaker. We’ll be posting a recording of this briefing on our website later today, and a transcript will be added in the next few days. We’ll start with you, Carla. First off, what is included in the category of PFAS, and why are they called forever chemicals?

[00:03:48]

CARLA NG: So that first question might sound simple, but it’s not that simple. It’s been the subject of much discussion. I think that it’s most useful if we think about PFAS based on two things. One is that it’s a chemical definition. So you can have very many different properties of PFAS, but they all fall within the PFAS class, and that it is based on something that is common to all PFAS and that is that they’re very, very persistent chemicals. That means they don’t break down easily in the environment. And that’s why they’re called forever chemicals, is because once they’re released, they’re going to be around for a very long time.

For the chemical definition, PFAS are highly fluorinated chemicals, and the technical definition that was put out by the OECD is that they are chemicals that include at least one carbon bonded to three flourines. That’s kind of at the end of a chemical group or within a chemical chain of carbon bonded to two flourines that doesn’t have other things bound to it. So that’s the technical definition. It’s a highly fluorinated organic chemical.

[00:04:46]

ELENA RENKEN: Excellent. And the OECD you mentioned, what is that organization?

[00:04:50]

CARLA NG: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, I believe. It’s a multi-government organization that does a lot of work around the environment and economies, and they have been working on PFAS definitions for several years now.

[00:05:06]

ELENA RENKEN: Excellent. Thank you. And how do PFAS get into the environment, and how do people come into contact with them?

[00:05:11]

CARLA NG: So I would say that PFAS are not just forever chemicals. They’re everywhere chemicals. I think this is one thing that makes them a little bit unique compared to other chemical classes we’ve dealt with in the past, is that they’re used in so many different applications. They’re used industrially. They’re used commercially. They’re used in our makeup and in medicines. And therefore, they get into the environment through a multitude of different routes.

For contaminated communities, they’re usually present in the drinking water. That’s how people in highly contaminated communities are usually exposed to PFAS because they’ve been released into their waterways. For the average person that doesn’t necessarily live near a contaminated site, you’re often getting exposure to PFAS through your food and through indoor environments because there are also many uses of PFAS in consumer products.

[00:05:59]

ELENA RENKEN: Very good to know that those are the main pathways. Thank you. How effective are current water treatment systems at removing PFAS, and are there any metrics or methods that journalists can look for to better understand their local systems?

[00:06:14]

CARLA NG: So it really depends on which PFAS you’re talking about. I think the good news is that some of the PFAS we have a lot of information on, what we call the legacy PFAS, that we know are quite toxic can be treated through fairly traditional means. So if we think about two of the best known PFAS are PFOA and PFOS, these are both C8 compounds. They have eight carbon atoms in them. And they can actually be treated through traditional drinking water treatment approaches like carbon filtration and ion exchange, which is the sort of thing we use for water softening. Unfortunately, the newer PFAS that have been used to replace these PFAS are much more water soluble and therefore much harder to be removed with these traditional approaches.

I think in terms of metrics, it’s difficult for PFAS because the health impacts that you’ll hear more about later, tell us that they can have effects at very low concentrations. And so just knowing that your water utility removes, say, 99% isn’t really telling you a lot. You really need to know what the concentrations of those compounds are in the water that’s being served to you. But luckily, that’s information you can find through monitoring programs from most public water utilities, and I’m happy to provide links later on for that.

[00:07:26]

ELENA RENKEN: That’s very good to know that the concentration matters for different kinds of PFAS. And where can reporters find resources to identify how testing occurs in their own communities or states?

[00:07:39]

CARLA NG: So as I was just alluding to, it’s a little bit of a patchwork, I would say. If you live in a larger town or in a city, you’re usually on what’s called city water, right? So you have municipally provided centralized drinking water treatment. And if it’s a publicly owned utility, then they are required to report on contaminants that are regulated, or that are required to be monitored. If you’re wondering historically how your town has done, there are two sources of reports from the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule. These are called UCMR 3 and UCMR 5, are both reports that have contained PFAS information in them. And you can look state by state and city by city and then look for your water treatment utility there.

[00:08:22]

ELENA RENKEN: Excellent resources for reporters have on hand. Thank you so much. And now I have some questions for you, Julia. First, what kinds of health effects have researchers seen linked to PFAS, and are there any populations that are most vulnerable? I’m so sorry. I think you’re muted there. I can’t hear you.

[00:08:44]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: My fault. Sorry.I was just starting to say that there has been kind of an explosion of PFAS research in recent years, partially due to the fact that almost every person has multiple PFAS in their bodies. And we have good evidence on immune system effects, like suppression of antibody response, which means less of an ability to fight off infections. Also effects on metabolism, like high cholesterol, decreased infant and fetal growth, things like low birth weight, which potentially has health implications for children later in life, and increased risk of cancer, specifically kidney cancer. And all of these were highlighted in a recent 2022 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine or NASEM. So that means that means we have a lot of good data on those outcomes.

And in terms of who’s most vulnerable, fetuses, children, and pregnant people are most at risk at the moment, and especially those who are dealing with higher contamination through their drinking water or exposure to other environmental pollutants or social stressors.

[00:10:06]

ELENA RENKEN: Excellent. Thank you. It’s key for journalists to look for those communities as they’re doing their sourcing. And how do low levels of long term PFAS exposure compared to short term high levels in terms of health risks, and who typically experiences each kind?

[00:10:22]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: Well, most of us are exposed to chronic low levels of multiple PFAS on a daily basis throughout our lives. So that includes the legacy PFAS that were mentioned earlier, PFOA and PFOS, which are two of the legacy long-chain PFAS that were used in Teflon, but also some of the shorter chain PFAS, like GenX and PFBS, which have largely replaced PFOA and PFOS, which are also used in these nonstick products, including things like food packaging, materials, some personal care products like dental floss. So these chronic low levels of exposure that most of us experience have been associated with the range of health outcomes that I mentioned already that were highlighted in that NASEM 2022 report.

But then there are also some groups that are exposed to higher levels of PFAS. On the job, for example, firefighters have higher PFAS exposures at work, which has also been associated with health risks, including testicular cancer in that group. And then some of the hotspots in the U.S. where some communities are dealing with that PFAS contamination of their drinking water systems. And then I would also just mention that children due to smaller body sizes and more hand to mouth behaviors tend to have higher PFAS exposures and, of course, are more sensitive due to their bodies developing.

[00:12:02]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. Those occupational risks and other specific risks might warrant their own coverage for reporters here. And what are the biggest gaps in our understanding of PFAS health effects?

[00:12:15]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: Well, that’s a good question. Like I said, there’s this explosion of science that’s continuing today. We have that good evidence I mentioned on some of those outcomes, and we have growing evidence since that 2022 report on other kinds of cancer like testicular cancer, like breast cancer, thyroid function, high blood pressure and pregnancy, things like ulcerate of colitis and so forth. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, IARC, recently classified this year PFOA finally as a carcinogen, which was a big deal.

But there is a ton of emerging evidence also coming to light. And I would look for emerging evidence specifically on neurological endpoints, which was a highlighted data gap in that 2022 report. And as a co-investigator in the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes, or ECHO program, which is a large data repository in the United States that’s tracking women and children — pregnant women and their children, over time to see what environmental exposures might be related to chronic diseases in children. This ECHO database is currently being leveraged for looking at correlations and associations between these PFAS exposures and neurological endpoints. So I would keep an eye out for that in the coming years.

[00:13:55]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. And where should reporters look for information on PFAS monitoring in their communities or states, and for information on safety thresholds that are set for different PFAS?

[00:14:07]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: Here I would make a plug for the PFAS contamination tracker that actually is run by the PFAS Project Lab that Dr. Cordner directs, which tracks known and suspected sites of PFAS contamination across the United States. But it is also important to note that every jurisdiction handles PFAS monitoring differently, so it’s really that patchwork of surveillance that Carla mentioned. And it can depend on the water municipality and the state. So a good place to start might be the equivalent of the state EPA agency and then looking at the specific water utilities for the region of interest.

[00:14:55]

ELENA RENKEN: Great. Thank you. And let’s now turn to you, Alissa. First off, are there any misconceptions or false claims circulating about PFAS, and can you address the evidence around them?

[00:15:10]

ALISSA CORDNER: I think one claim you hear more and more frequently as PFAS become more widely discussed in the public, is the idea that, as other panelists have mentioned, and as is very true, these compounds are very widely used. They’re in innumerable consumer products in our own homes, in our work environments and offices, and where we spend our days. And so there is a claim or a misconception that because these chemicals are everywhere, therefore, there’s nothing we can do about them. And I think that is completely untrue and it’s a distortion of the idea of what it means for something to be widespread. The fact that PFAS are widespread doesn’t mean that their use is inevitable, their continued use is inevitable. And it also doesn’t mean that action, meaningful action, shouldn’t be taken whenever possible to reduce the use of PFAS in consumer uses and industrial processes to reduce PFAS emissions, to try to lower the future exposures that people might be experiencing.

Another misconception, I think, is that because there has been some action at the federal scale, to regulate PFAS, that the problem has been addressed or dealt with. And I think that is also very untrue. As Dr. Ng said, depending on how you define this class of chemicals, it becomes a very complex and large group of chemicals, well over 10,000 according to some definitions. And we currently have drinking water regulations for six PFAS, and those regulations are being challenged by the current federal Environmental Protection Agency administration. So PFAS are a very complex environmental contaminant, and there has been a lot of progress, but there’s a lot of work still to be done to meaningfully protect public health.

[00:17:15]

ELENA RENKEN: And to extend what you were mentioning in terms of regulation, do existing regulations adequately protect human and environmental health?

[00:17:23]

ALISSA CORDNER: Some existing regulations are specifically designed to be health protective. For example, those federal drinking water regulations that were finalized in 2024 for those six PFAS were designed to be health protective while also being technologically feasible for local systems to implement. You can’t have a standard that identifies a PFAS level that’s actually lower than what tests can measure or lower than what cleanup technology can achieve. But those standards are certainly anchored in a health protective approach.

There also has been a lot of progress in terms of regulation and legislation at the state level. For example, there are programs that require labeling or phase out of some or all PFAS. There are programs that restrict the use of PFAS in certain product categories. Our research group, the PFAS Project Lab, maintains a database of governance actions on PFAS that includes regulations and legislation that’s available at governance.pfasproject.com. And there are other great data sources as well, great information sources about regulations. The nonprofit group Safer States maintains a really nice visual interactive dashboard of state level actions. That’s at saferstates.org. The Rockefeller Institute also has an interactive display of state level legislation called the PFAS Policy Dashboard. So those are a few sources for folks who might be interested in finding more information about local or state regulations.

However, there are also major threats to health protective regulation around PFAS, particularly with rollbacks in the current EPA administration. They recently announced that they are planning to maintain those drinking water regulations for two PFAS, although on a delayed schedule, but they plan to reconsider the drinking water regulations for the other four PFAS where those regulations were actually finalized last year.

There have been other actions as well that haven’t received quite as much attention. For example, just yesterday on July 9th, EPA announced plans to withdraw a rule that would have required people to report to EPA if they were going to engage in certain types of significant new uses of PFAS. So while there is some there certainly is more meaningful regulation at the federal scale than there was several years ago, there are major threats to PFAS health regulations right now.

[00:20:00]

ELENA RENKEN: And are there any examples of successful PFAS remediation efforts that others can learn from?

[00:20:06]

ALISSA CORDNER: There are absolutely local examples of successful remediation. And from studying those examples across the country and working closely with impacted communities, the commonalities you see in those cases of successful remediation tend to be where a responsible party or a responsible polluter was identified — by responsible I mean the person or entity that caused the pollution, not someone acting very responsibly. So the polluter responsible for the pollution was identified and held accountable for that pollution. And crucially, they listened to residents, they listened to impacted people in the community and acted in good faith, rather than acting in ways that tried to delay or prevent a meaningful remediation and cleanup.

Unfortunately, what we see in many cases is that those polluters are trying to delay decisions, to delay cleanup actions, often to save money in the short term, but this leaves residents in limbo sometimes for years. We’ve worked with communities that have been waiting for three or more years for some sort of clean drinking water to be provided for them, three or more years after learning that their home drinking water was contaminated. And these cases are very local specific.

And so if reporters or other folks are interested in learning directly from those impacted communities, there’s a national network of impacted community groups called the National PFAS Contamination Coalition, or NPCC, and that group might be able to connect you with a particular group or to help you talk to other advocacy leaders around the country. Additionally, on our website, the PFAS Project Lab’s website, there is a map that includes, as Dr. Varshavsky mentioned, points of known and likely sites of PFAS contamination. But there’s also a layer on that map that identifies the locations of community groups. So you can use that map to find community groups and impacted residents in local communities.

[00:22:24]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. Some great resources there. And you mentioned a bit about the kinds of PFAS regulation that exist at local, state, federal levels. What kinds of regulation do you consider promising here?

[00:22:35]

ALISSA CORDNER: Until very recently, there was relatively little regulation at the federal level, and so states really became the leaders in developing and implementing PFAS regulations. There are many different categories of actions that have made a real difference in the last, say, ten years. There’s been lots of attention to drinking water. So in the absence of a federal standard, over a dozen states developed either advisory or regulatory drinking water levels to protect their residents. There also has been a lot of attention to PFAS in firefighting foams that contained these chemicals, as well as attention to protecting firefighters because this is a population that because of their exposure to PFAS containing foam, as well as the turnout gear or the personal protective equipment they wear, they have higher potential exposures to PFAS. So there’s been actually a tremendous amount of really exciting regulations and legislation at the state level.

There’s also been a lot of attention to PFAS in different types of products, so thinking about PFAS in textiles or PFAS in food packaging. And some of those programs either require labeling, which is useful to all consumers just to know what’s happening in the products they buy, or can even require something called alternatives assessment, which asks product manufacturers to identify alternative ways meeting the same product performance that PFAS might have provided, so that nonstick surface, for example, what else can meet that nonstick surface performance, and is it actually less hazardous? Because you don’t want to replace toxic chemical A with toxic chemical B. So that type of alternatives assessment program can be really valuable.

Some states have also pursued specific actions because of things that have happened on the ground in those states. For example, the state of Maine has really been a leader in protecting farmers and addressing the issue of PFAS in contaminated sludge or biosolid, the stuff left over from a wastewater treatment plant, because of local contamination there. Federally, there has been relatively little action legislatively by Congress, except for some amendments in the big military budget bill that comes up every year. Some of those have provided funding for certain initiatives or have triggered required regulatory actions. And so you see this sort of interaction of things happening at the state level and things happening at the federal level.

[00:25:24]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you all for that expertise. Now, I’m going to pose some questions to all our panelists. And reporters on the line, a quick reminder here to add your questions using the Q&A box at the bottom of your Zoom screen. But before we get to those audience questions, I wanted to ask all our panelists here, what tips do you have for reporters covering PFAS?

[00:25:52]

ALISSA CORDNER: I spouted out a lot of websites in my talk already, so I could just sort of run through a few things. I mentioned the National PFAS Contamination Coalition and really seeking out local advocacy groups. I think that’s always a wonderful way to start. And part of that is because people who are directly impacted by PFAS contamination develop a tremendous amount of expertise on these classes of chemicals, on the science related to health effects and exposure, and on what’s happening in terms of regulation and governance. So they can be a tremendous resource.

Our website also runs a daily news update, and so that can be a useful place to find information about other reporting happening on PFAS. There’s another website called the PFAS Exchange, and that has a lot of fact sheets and resources. For example, how can you estimate your PFAS blood exposure if you know what your drinking water levels are, or how do you talk to your health provider about PFAS? And that’s pfas-exchange.org. And then there’s another website called PFAS Central that has information about science, policy, and it also has a guide for finding consumer products that are made without PFAS. For example, that’s how we found our waffle maker, which has really improved our brunch life in our home, and that’s pfascentral.org.

[00:27:21]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: And I would say, if I can jump in, that to remember that low levels of PFAS exposure are important in terms of health impacts, so it’s not just high levels. And these low levels — well, PFAS are — many of them are endocrine disruptors, which basically means that at very low levels, they can impact the molecular signaling that governs reproduction and development and function throughout the life course, and we’re really sensitive to the interruption of molecular signaling during times of development or biological change.

[00:28:03]

CARLA NG: And I want to put in a plug here for water utilities just because I’m an engineer, and I think that we are sometimes now in an era of real skepticism against regulations and government, public bodies and things like that. And I want to mention that the water utility is not the source of the PFAS contamination. They’re dealing with contamination that has happened within their water systems. And so it’s important, I think, to just help the community understand how water utilities are often trying to get a handle on this problem, so that it isn’t necessarily an adversarial relationship between the water user and the water producer. Also because I’ve run into a lot of folks who just don’t trust their water utility anymore, even after they get results back that are okay. And bottled drinking water is not necessarily going to be safer for you than one that’s treated, provided it’s treated adequately by your drinking water utility. So I think some of this information is really important to get out to the public, that their tap water may actually have lower levels of PFAS than some bottled water. So I think it’s important to get that right as well.

[00:29:13]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you all. Our first question here is from a reporter in Rhode Island. It’s for Dr. Ng. Can you be more specific about what products contain PFAS?

[00:29:23]

CARLA NG: Sure. I’m happy too. So maybe I’ll try and prioritize these a little bit in terms of major exposure routes. I think we’ve already mentioned here firefighting foam. So in terms of the largest number of water systems and well systems affected across the world, I would say the use of firefighting foams is probably one of the most important ones because these specialized firefighting foams that contain PFAS were used anywhere that they had to fight fuel containing fires, so all airports, military bases, etc. And because they weren’t aware of the effects for a long time, they would just use these not just when they were fighting fires, which are not necessarily that frequent, but every time they trained. So fire training areas, also firefighter training areas had high concentrations, and that goes directly into water once it washes into the environment.

The other source for really highly contaminated communities is the actual production of products containing PFAS. So that is PFAS production itself. It is production of fluorinated polymers like Teflon. It’s also production of things that are then treated with PFAS, so textiles, leather treatment, paper treatment, so paper mills that produce a lot of aqueous waste, water waste that was contaminated with PFAS. So those are the large — the high concentration sources.

Then we have many, many lower diffused sources of PFAS. So some more specialized industries like chrome plating. There’s some use of PFAS in the oil and gas industry. And then closer to home, there’s uses of PFAS in textiles treated at the mill, then contaminate the environment. You bring those textiles home and you wash them in your washing machine, and that goes out on your wastewater. Uses of PFAS in food packaging was very common for paper-based packaging. It’s much less common now, but still persists for some. Plastics that are treated with PFAS. And then in your home, there are many cleaning products, floor polishes, things like that that contain PFAS.

All of our electronics. So this nice nonstick coating on, that’s supposed to keep fingerprint smudges from happening on your cell phone, that’s done through PFAS. And then there are newer uses that are of concern because they are important, but we want to limit the use of PFAS. So things like solar panels, things like batteries for electric cars, and things like architectural coatings also have a lot of PFAS. And then finally, the ones that are a little bit less direct, and often they wonder whether they should be classified as PFAS because the degree of fluorination is smaller, but it still leads to releases into the environment, is fluorinated pesticides, fluorinated drugs that often have just a couple of fluorinated groups on the bigger molecule.

[00:32:07]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. And on the other side of this, we have a question from the Portland Press Herald. Can anyone talk about PFAS disposal tracking and how reporters can track where PFAS-laden sludge or spent or unused firefighting foam is sent for disposal? Any information on that?

[00:32:35]

ALISSA CORDNER: I can offer an answer. I’m not sure how helpful it will be, but the answer is it really depends on the media on the substance that you’re trying to track. So for sludge, for example, there should be permitting through your state likely environment agency, and so it would be finding whoever the — they’ll probably call it biosolids, not sludge. So find out who manages the biosolids program and ask for information about permit sites, permit locations.

There’s currently no nationwide map, as far as we know, of where these sludge sites exist across the country, and there are uncertainties about how much of a threat this is to the food supply. There have been some very high-profile cases. High profile in the world of PFAS nerds, but there have been some very high-profile cases of really devastating contamination on individual farms, typically linking industrial waste sludge to the application of this sludge to farmland and then that farmland being used to grow crops that get into a livestock food supply.

There are really devastating cases that we know of, and at the same time, there isn’t a nationwide monitoring program for PFAS and sludge. So there’s still some uncertainty about how widespread that severe outcome might be. For tracking other types of PFAS and movement of other types of PFAS waste, there are ways to look at using the EPA’s transfer of hazardous waste system. There’s ways to look at transfers of hazardous waste, and that requires some familiarity with the ECHO database, the environmental compliance database that the U.S. EPA maintains.

[00:34:44]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. And a question here from VPM News in Richmond, Virginia. Can you speak a little more on the sludge regulations in Maine or resources to learn more? Did they implement an outright sludge spreading ban? And do we know much yet about the outcomes of that move?

[00:35:03]

ALISSA CORDNER: I can speak a little bit about that. Maine, through the really devastating contamination that was uncovered through a dairy farm in Maine—initially, uncovered through a dairy farm. Maine has done the most systematic testing of sludge and investigation of historic sludge application sites. Initially, they had a concentration-based standard for PFAS in sludge, and unfortunately, they found that basically none of their sludge could meet that standard. And so it amounted to a de facto ban. And for more information, there has been some really amazing work by environmental health nonprofits in Maine. A group Defend Our Health in particular would be wonderful to reach out to.

[00:36:01]

ELENA RENKEN: And then we have a question that came from a few different reporters. What advice would you give readers who are looking for water filtration options for their homes? Are there any home water filters you’re aware of that do a good job filtering out most kinds of PFAS?

[00:36:13]

CARLA NG: I can start here, and maybe Alissa will know this better. I think that there is a website that is maintained by NC State that includes some recommendations for water filters. As Professor Detlef Knappe has done a lot of really good work in testing these. I will generally say that a single-stage filter that’s just carbon, which is typically what you’ll find in your Brita filter, is not going to cut it for all PFAS. It’ll do okay for PFOA and PFOS and the long-chain compounds, but you will have to change out that filter more often than you normally would for other things. You can get multi-stage filters that have a combination of carbon and iron exchange, and those are more effective at reducing PFAS.

Again, you do have to be changing your filters fairly often. I would never keep a water filter, even a multi-stage one, longer than six months in operation. Usually, you should go down to maybe three if you have shorter chain compounds in your water. I think that they’ve had some success with what are called carbon block filters as well. The thing that will remove everything is reverse osmosis.

If you’re worried about the short chains as well, you can get a reverse osmosis system, but that creates its own issues because it dramatically lowers your water pressure. It wastes a large proportion of the water, and it creates a concentrated PFAS waste that then typically will go into your wastewater treatment facility. I think where contaminated communities maybe have an issue where they have real contamination, they will do some more centralized type RO systems, but there are a few options. I think it’s good to know what’s in your water, to then target that a little bit better when you’re selecting your filter.

[00:38:02]

ALISSA CORDNER: If I can add that North Carolina State group did some testing, looking at specific filters and which ones were effective at removing what amounts of PFAS, and a couple takeaways that I noted from their research. One is exactly as Dr. Ng was saying, if you don’t change your filters, you might be making the problem worse because those filters will concentrate PFAS and other types of waste. And then once the filters are saturated, they’ll start releasing whatever has accumulated in those filters back into the drinking water. Regular changing of those filters is absolutely essential. They also looked at some whole-house filters, which are extremely expensive options, take up a lot of space, take a lot of money to install. And they really cautioned against those types of systems because they remove some of the essential chemistry in the water that is needed to maintain your plumbing. So you actually could end up really harming plumbing in the home if you’re installing a system that is that whole-house model.

Two things I would note about home filtration. One is that if a system doesn’t explicitly say that it has been tested and validated by a reputable independent lab to remove PFAS, you should assume that it does not remove PFAS. Your standard on the counter filter isn’t removing nearly as much as a person might hope it does, PFAS or otherwise. Then the final thing I would say is that any home filtration is only accessible to people who have that disposable income to spend, whether it’s 50 bucks a month on new filters or $3,000 for a larger system. It’s only accessible to a really small portion of the population, which is another reason why we have to be looking upstream at larger solutions to reduce exposure.

[00:40:03]

ELENA RENKEN: A question here from the Montana Free Press. Are there any groups tracking rates of various cancers and health conditions tied to known PFAS contamination sites at the community scale?

[00:40:17]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: I wanted to answer the question about some of the resources for health impacts include the PFAS-Tox Database, which I forgot to mention, pfostoxdatabase.org, which has been leveraged. It’s a systematic evidence map, which basically means it has all of the studies on health and toxicology from animal studies, human studies, and in vitro studies over time, and you can search for health outcomes like cancer. It has been leveraged in decision making by community groups that are impacted, that have wanted to bring that information to their decision makers, and then at higher agency levels of decision making that are evaluating chemicals. It’s one of the factors, for example, that informed IARC’s carcinogen labeling of PFOA. I’ll let Dr. Cordner or Dr. Ng talk more about actual community groups that have leveraged that data or what other data there might be.

[00:41:37]

ALISSA CORDNER: I can’t speak to that exact question, but I will note there are some multi-site research studies that are trying to answer this exact question to link up local exposures, particularly in communities known to have higher amounts of PFAS exposure, most of them from historic firefighting foam use and link up that higher level of exposure with particular health endpoints. There’s a federally funded study under the umbrella of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, ATSDR, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That multi-site study is trying to look at this question of what’s happening in local communities that are known to have higher levels of PFAS exposure. The results aren’t back yet for all of those sites, though.

[00:42:31]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. A question here from a reporter at Georgia Public Broadcasting. What kind of training do health care providers get to treat PFAS? And what about public health systems? Where can people who have been exposed to PFAS go for help?

[00:42:49]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: I can start with that one and then pass it to Dr. Cordner. The NASEM 2022 report is a report that offers clinical guidance for PFAS testing. For example, if you have certain levels of PFAS in your blood, they recommend certain clinical guidance above a certain amount, they would start screening you, for example, for high cholesterol or for high blood pressure during pregnancy. That report provides that kind of guidance, and I can let Dr. Cordner talk about how that’s being used.

[00:43:33]

ALISSA CORDNER: This is a real challenge for impacted communities. Residents learn that their water is contaminated, and they go to their doctors or their nurse practitioners, and they want guidance. Unfortunately, the training for medical professionals, includes very little on environmental health generally. Not the fault of individual providers, but this is really a limitation on how society is training healthcare providers to address PFAS contamination, but also other environmental health or occupational health issues. Using that guidance from the NASEM report that Dr. Varshavsky mentioned, the PFAS Exchange website has a couple of very user-friendly fact sheets where, for example, one of them is designed for clinicians themselves and links up questions about people’s exposure, and then exactly what tests you might want to order.

That type of more enhanced medical monitoring can be really important for folks in impacted communities. For example, we have worked with residents who knew they had higher levels of exposure; they sought out more frequent testing and screening for medical conditions that ultimately detected very serious illness, but in an early stage. While it’s virtually never possible to link any individual’s health outcome to their individual PFAS exposure, you can look at population-level trends and see if I have a certain level of exposure, I might be at higher risk for this condition, I want to get that more frequent screening. Again, there’s a couple of fact sheets under the resources, I think it’s called resources or fact sheets tab of pfas-exchange.org, and those are useful for health professionals.

People often wonder about PFAS blood testing. Should I get tested? How do I get tested? At this point, it is challenging to have your individual blood sampled for PFAS. There are commercially available tests that involve a pin prick, a finger spot of blood that can test for a number of PFAS with a high degree of accuracy, it seems. To order tests through your doctor’s office can be much more expensive and typically is not covered by insurance. There are ways to predict what your blood exposure might be based on your drinking water exposure, but that’s very imperfect because it isn’t able to take into account occupational exposures or other historic exposures you might have had.

[00:46:30]

ELENA RENKEN: I appreciate that note that this kind of reporting will be parsing levels of risk and uncertainty rather than a clear sense of causation. Thank you. A question from a journalist based in Delaware for Dr. Ng: Could you please talk more about emerging PFAS, including how researchers and regulators keep up with what’s new?

[00:46:49]

CARLA NG: I think this is really important, and I think that the real answer is we don’t keep up. Often, people whose expertise is in, for example, analytical chemistry, feel like they are private eyes out there, looking into water systems and trying to figure out what’s there. I think we know now that even though we call them emerging PFAS, often these compounds have been around and some guise or another for decades. So PFOS and PFOA, we’re talking about 1930s, 1940s when they first started producing these compounds. They’re not new. We just found out about them, and we’re finding out more and more about their health effects. There is a proliferation of ever more confusing structural types of PFASs. Part of it is because they find new uses, and part of it is because one thing gets banned, something else comes along.

I think a concerning general blob of family of PFAS are the ethers. These are the compounds that came around as a replacement for PFOA in the manufacturing of fluoropolymers like Teflon. You’ll often hear people talk about GenX. GenX is a process and a family of chemicals that is used to manufacture these fluoropolymers. It’s not just the one compound that usually people talk about GenX, but a whole family of them. A lot of them are quite toxic, and that’s something that’s really concerning because they’re not regulated, aside from HFPO-DA, which was about to be regulated, and now that’s being contested in drinking water. I think something that was alluded to earlier in terms of the efficacy of regulation, whether it’s health protective or not.

I would say that we’re making some progress that’s important in having regulations, but the chemical-specific regulation is really difficult to be effective because it’s one by one and something else is going to be manufactured. I think the approaches that are trying to group things and do things based either on groups or on uses of PFAS. There are some state-based regulations that are more about don’t put them into consumer food items or don’t put them into makeup is much more health protective and much more effective than something that’s looking at a specific chemical when we have tens of thousands of these out there now.

[00:49:08]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. The next question here is from Chemical & Engineering News. Dr. Cordner mentioned communities who have been successful at holding corporations accountable for contaminating their water. I’m curious how they’ve been able to do that. I’ve seen some challenges where industries deflect by saying that PFAS could be in the water from so many sources. Have these communities been able to identify specific PFAS compounds that are obviously tied to their industries?

[00:49:39]

ALISSA CORDNER: The cases where communities have been the most successful, unfortunately, are some of the most egregious examples where contamination has occurred over decades at extremely high levels with initially very little emissions control and virtually no communication to the public. Historic examples of the DuPont facility in Parkersburg, West Virginia, or the facilities in Hoosick Falls are examples where the contamination was so extreme and resulted in very successful but drawn-out litigation. Even in those cases where we might say that the corporations were financially held accountable to some degree because of these very large settlement payments, there still were years and years of delay and denial. Hoosick Falls has been aware of this contamination for well over a decade. A recent book by journalist Mariah Blake documents the history of this community and ties it to decades of deception and cover-up by chemical corporations.

There are examples of communities at least identifying and ultimately receiving financial compensation from corporations. But unfortunately, those examples do come along with many delays and distortions of science by corporate entities. There are some examples of communities identifying contamination linked to an airport or a military facility where cleanup has been conducted in a more responsive timeline. Part of that is after the U.S. military worked through a few initial cases, and after the U.S. EPA put in place a health advisory level for PFOA and PFOS in 2016, at least there was a federal advisory level identifying a health-based threshold of concern. Now, those health thresholds of concern have come down quite a bit from the 70 parts per trillion that we were looking at in 2016.

Some communities living near airports or near military facilities did have more success with getting cleanup and remediation of those sites, a very mixed bag and a lot of factors that seem to go into what type of cleanup and what speed, what type of relationship those communities had with their local officers at those facilities. A lot of unevenness there as well. I wish I could offer a more positive answer, but all of the cases that I’m aware of in terms of corporate pollution and many of the cases involving military, airport, or fire training facility pollution still do involve quite a bit of delay and sometimes scientific distortion by the polluter. There was also a question about essentially trying to fingerprint individual PFAS and link them to particular facilities. That often is used as an argument by potentially responsible polluters that PFAS are everywhere, as we’ve talked about. How do you know it came from us, even if we were right upstream or right upwind, how do you know it came from us? That is a very common argument.

There has been some really interesting scientific fingerprinting where they identify very particular chemistries in effluent or in other samples, and they are able to link those to particular production facilities. This happened in New Jersey with a Solvay facility. It has happened. It is very complicated, time intensive, expensive, and the burden shouldn’t be so extremely placed on local communities and residents to try to prove that link when it seems very obvious that the most likely explanation is a massive chemical plant right upstream or a military facility that used fluorinated foam for three decades every single month. I don’t know if other folks have more to say about the chemical fingerprinting piece.

[00:54:23]

CARLA NG: I just wanted to mention two things that made me think of. One is that I agree. There’s always this huge delay from the science to the implementation. I think there are some cool new methods coming up that people are using machine learning methods with chemical fingerprints to try and do this source allocation to figure out where the pollution came from. That’s exciting, but who knows how long that’ll take to actually turn into action? And because of that, I think one of the frustrations I have is that cleaning up what has already happened is difficult enough, but the fact that we’re not stopping the new parts means we’re going to have to deal with that in the future. I think that’s one of the biggest issues with the push-back against the MCLs because if you look at what’s been proposed is they want to keep away PFOA and PFOS. These are two compounds that are no longer used in the U.S. These were phased out already. What they’re trying to stop the regulation on are the current use compounds, which means you will continue to allow the active release of more compounds into the environment, and then have to figure out how to clean it up and who is responsible. It’s really important to have regulations that apply to current use chemistries and not just to legacy ones.

[00:55:39]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: I’ll just add one thing to that, which is just going back to what I think Dr. Cordner mentioned earlier about the need for designing products with the same uses to be more safe and to use safer alternatives. That is an upstream solution along with regulation, where we need innovation from industry to create better alternatives so that we don’t have this whack-a-mole problem.

[00:56:13]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. And I’ve got a question here from E&E News. The EPA is planning to cut staff at its Office of Research and Development. What impact could that have for research on PFAS, whether that’s on toxicity and health risks, or on disposal and destruction technologies, or anything else? Anyone aware of any research specifically that’s at risk?

[00:56:33]

CARLA NG: I think everybody agrees it would be devastating. We were just talking about, for example, the discovery of these ether compounds. And EPA ORD staff that basically pioneered the use of non-target analysis to discover these new PFAS compounds really pushed the envelope. They pioneered the discovery of PFAS’s air contaminants, not just water contaminants. Their research has been integral to our ability to get a handle on what’s being put out there and what the potential impacts will be. I think it’ll be devastating.

[00:57:11]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: I would add to that from a public health perspective, it would also be devastating. There are great people working in that office that have also pioneered our ability to use updated science when making risk assessment decisions on human health. For example, using human studies, which we have more of now, and finding ways to integrate human studies with the animal studies that were historically used to make health-based decisions. The ability of that office to keep advancing risk assessment that protects public health will be greatly impacted.

[00:57:59]

ALISSA CORDNER: The Office of Research and Development at EPA has been separate from the headquarters, policymaking, and political office intentionally and for very good reason. And that’s to allow the researchers to pursue investigations that are about making the very best possible science, developing the very best possible knowledge. The current EPA at as is very evident from all of their press releases, for example, is highly politicized and incorporating the researchers at a greatly reduced scale, incorporating the research office into the headquarters office threatens EPA science to no longer be independent and about the best available knowledge, but rather about knowledge that serves political interest. That is not going to allow for the development of science-based policy that protects public health and the environment.

[00:59:01]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. And before my last question for today, which we’ll ask our experts here for some key takeaways, I want to let reporters know that you’re going to receive a brief email survey from us at SciLine after the briefing. If you have even 30 seconds to give us feedback, it would really help us shape future programs like this around your needs. And with that, here’s one last question for our full panel. In about 30 seconds, what is one key take home message for reporters covering PFAS? Anyone want to go first?

[00:59:37]

JULIA VARSHAVSKY: I will. I would say that my key takeaway is that there is a lot of evidence on PFAS and health outcomes, a lot of different health outcomes, including at low levels of exposure. It is important to think about those who are most sensitive, which I mentioned are fetuses, children, and pregnant people, but also communities that we’ve talked about that are impacted either by high PFAS contamination in their drinking water or are overburdened with other chemical and non-chemical stressors.

[01:00:18]

CARLA NG: I think what I would say is to understand how broad of a question it is, how much we can learn about the issues with chemical safety and chemical regulation writ large, that PFAS really makes clear, and that it’s not just the chemicals that are in the water, but there’s a lot of current use PFAS that are really important not to lose sight of and to understand how pervasive they are, not just in our drinking water, but in our daily lives.

[01:00:51]

ALISSA CORDNER: I would add to both of those comments that there’s a tremendous amount of information about PFAS as a class, having concern for toxicity and exposure, far more than we need to take meaningful action to restrict the use of PFAS in virtually all situations with possible exceptions for when the use might be really evaluated as being essential for society, and there’s not a currently available substitute. Even in those situations, we could be furthering innovation to develop those safer alternatives so that we are able to move away from using PFAS. I would also add that PFAS are a really important environmental and health issue on their own, but they’re also a symptom of the broader issue of chemical management.

Many of the statements that we’ve made about PFAS, we could also make about dozens of other types of compounds or hazards that are out there because the regulatory systems have not done a good job of restricting hazardous compounds, and the overall system is set up to essentially require an overwhelming burden of proof before any regulatory activity can be pursued. And you pair that with the tremendous incentive that companies have to keep producing and creating products to try to increase their profits. It’s a system that isn’t able to protect public health in a meaningful way. PFASs are a symptom of this broader problem.

[01:02:23]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you all so much. We’re grateful to the scientists here with us today, sharing their knowledge on this topic as regulation changes and our understanding of PFAS evolves. Thanks to every journalist on the line here for attending to learn more and better serve your audiences with solid evidence. Hopefully, we’ll see you at the next SciLine briefing. Thank you.