Study Finds Alarming Levels of 'Forever Chemicals' In US Mothers' Breast Milk (theguardian.com) 100
Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes the Guardian:
A new study that checked American women's breast milk for PFAS contamination detected the toxic chemical in all 50 samples tested, and at levels nearly 2,000 times higher than the level some public health advocates advise is safe for drinking water. The findings "are cause for concern" and highlight a potential threat to newborns' health, the study's authors say. "The study shows that PFAS contamination of breast milk is likely universal in the US, and that these harmful chemicals are contaminating what should be nature's perfect food," said Erika Schreder, a co-author and science director with Toxic Free Future, a Seattle-based non-profit that pushes industry to find alternatives to the chemicals.
PFAS, or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used to make products like food packaging, clothing and carpeting water and stain resistant. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. They are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems. The peer-reviewed study, published on Thursday in the Environmental Science and Technology journal, found PFAS at levels in milk ranging from 50 parts per trillion (ppt) to more than 1,850ppt.
There are no standards for PFAS in breast milk, but the public health advocacy organization Environmental Working Group puts its advisory target for drinking water at 1ppt, and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, within the Department of Health and Human Services, recommends as little as 14ppt in children's drinking water.
PFAS, or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used to make products like food packaging, clothing and carpeting water and stain resistant. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. They are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems. The peer-reviewed study, published on Thursday in the Environmental Science and Technology journal, found PFAS at levels in milk ranging from 50 parts per trillion (ppt) to more than 1,850ppt.
There are no standards for PFAS in breast milk, but the public health advocacy organization Environmental Working Group puts its advisory target for drinking water at 1ppt, and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, within the Department of Health and Human Services, recommends as little as 14ppt in children's drinking water.
Frustrating article (Score:2, Insightful)
If they "don't break down", that means they don't react. By what mechanism, then, are they supposed to cause all these illnesses?
(Not impossible. Asbestos is unreactive, xenon is a noble gas, but one causes cancer and one is an anesthetic. They work via physics rather than chemistry).
What is the reason for a standard measured in parts per trillion? At that level, you're likely to find anything you could name in any body fluid. Toxicologists say "the dose makes the poison".
I wish science writers would ask qu
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Chemicals can act as catalysts or as enzyme inhibitors without being consumed in the process.
PFASs adversely affect human health by disrupting hormones.
Health concerns associated with PFASs [wikipedia.org]
Banned in EU (Score:2)
There are plenty of articles and evidence that these are NOT inert compounds, and by no means harmless.
Studies have shown that large doses cause a lot of health issues. However, the sheer extent of these are not yet discovered.
That we know something to be bad for our health, doesn't mean we should keep ignoring that fact until we know HOW bad. (Case in point: CDC https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitor... [cdc.gov])
In Europe studies have shown PFAS to be the most persistent chemical ever manufactured, and majority of the type
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Also, it looks like DuPont et al deliberately hid ill effects that they discovered during testing from the FDA when seeking approval for these compounds.
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Ah, but now they have a new fluoride chemical to create PTFE ... and this one can break down! (Into two compounds, one of which is ultra-persistent and almost certainly as biologically active as PFOA, but it will take a while for regulators to wack that mole.)
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Just because a substance is chemically stable doesn't mean it is biologically inactive. Many/most physiological processes are triggered by molecules interacting with receptors (ie. neurotransmitters like serotonin or dopamine, sex hormones like testosterone or estrogen).
Receptor stimulation does not always require a chemical interaction to occur.
There are a whole host of these substances used in plastic manufacturing that are known to strongly mimic estrogen and make their way into the liquids they are use
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Exactly.
If these things are inert, they might be harmless and it's whatever that's packed in them that people eat and drink that's actually causing the dropping sperm counts and 57 genders.
As Richard Feynman once said, "anyone can sit down at a typewriter and write 'broccoli grown in organic fertalizer is good for you.' Could be true, could be not true...but they didn't do the work to find out."
Untrue assumption. Just because a substance does not react chemically and undergo change does not mean it cannot facilitate chemical or physical reactions. Enzymes are generally not consumed in reactions, but facilitate other compounds reacting. The presence of these chemicals may act to catalyze or inhibit other necessary reactions, or act as physical irritants and lead to inflammation.
A shard of glass rubbing on your foot isn't being consumed or reacting chemically with your foot, but it causes irritation
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If they "don't break down", that means they don't react. By what mechanism, then, are they supposed to cause all these illnesses?
Simplistic. A catalyst does not break down. Nor does it react. It accelerates... one might even say catalyzes reactions that would be very slow or not occur at all in the absence of said catalyst.
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Simplistic. A catalyst does react. It provides a faster route to the desired substance. It's just what makes it a catalyst is that the eventual reaction generates the same amount of catalyst as went in, so it appears you have what you started with.
Re:Frustrating article (Score:4)
Re:Frustrating article (Score:4)
Re: Frustrating article (Score:2)
Science is, by definition, pedantic. Not rude, mind you, but pedantic.
One major problem with media today is an obvious lack of specificity and attention to detail. Both have proven annoying at best, and deadly/fatal at worst.
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Professionally
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In this case though with PFAS, when we consider them functionally immortal they could still act as catalysts. If other compounds are incapable of causing permanent rearrangement of their structure while interacting with them, they will always, as you say, return in the exact quantity with which they began. That does not mean they are not capable of acting as catalysts, inhibitors, or irritants.
Re:Frustrating article (Score:5, Informative)
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Mercury doesn't "break down", but it does undergo a chemical reaction, combining with selenium to form the compound HgSe. This makes it impossible for selenium to play its normal role in fighting oxidation in the brain, leading to brain damage. Source [sciencedirect.com]
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Re: frustrating nihilist capitalism (Score:2)
That isn't this. Lots of these chemicals are supposed to be from microplastics, I think. Those were definitely an accident, although they certainly seem to be doing the antinatalists' work.
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Your body being able to "break down" a substance is not mutually exclusive with something being inert. Can your body break down toxic metals such as cadmium? But hey ingest all the cadmium you want since your body can't break it down. That means it can't react according to your logic.
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Yes the chemicals leave people individually, but remain cycling in the local ecosystem indefinitely so keep entering the body as fast as leaving it.
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That applies to every chemical present in the environment. Oxygen for example. And oxygen is actually known to be severely harmful (read on oxygen poisoning for example), unlike most inert things.
And there are plenty of inert things in the environment that are highly stable. Helium for example. Which you can actually substitute nitrogen for if you want, another stable chemical present in the environment.
This whole "but it's cycling in the ecosystem" is one of the worst scare tactics of all times if you unde
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Yes it does. What idiot told you otherwise?
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Helium has been around for a while, we are using our ability for high energy and naturally implausible processes to create vast quantities of new persistent chemicals ... when those chemicals have biological activity at low concentrations that can cause problems for the moment. It will take a while to evolve to ignore them.
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This assumes that every novel chemical is harmful.
Again, self evidently false for reasons mentioned above.
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No. Just no.
Some chemicals (ones we call persistent) will remain in the environment for a long time. Others will undergo decomposition in short order. We worry less about the short lived ones since if we find them to be harmful, we can stop producing them and concentrations will soon fall. We worry more about the persistent ones because by the time we find out they're harmful to humans, they will persist at harmful levels for decades.
Worst of all are the ones that bio-accumulate. Those are why pregnant wome
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You appear to not understand the mechanics of mercury and how it ends in the oceans. It's not very persistent, as it is cycled out within a few years. The problem is that we (and by that I mean mostly Chinese and other developing nations) burn a lot of coal. Which releases a lot of mercury, which then ends in the oceans, which then bio-accumulates as it's cycled out of the ecosystem. The problem is the constant feed in and the total amounts, which is why we can still eat seafood. We just have to limit the a
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So where do you think the mercury goes after it ends up in the fish? I assure you at doesn't transmute into gold. Note how the mercury manages to react with neurological repair mechanisms and still manages to be available to impair the organism that eats the affected organism.
Consider, Argon is very much an inert gas. It only reacts under the most extreme conditions, but if too much accumulates in the room you're in, you will die.
There is a vast difference between scare mongering and fear of the new and sim
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>So where do you think the mercury goes after it ends up in the fish?
That which is not excreted and sink, up the food chain till alpha predators, then excreted by them through normal metabolism even by them.
>Note how the mercury manages to react with neurological repair mechanisms and still manages to be available to impair the organism that eats the affected organism.
I do believe I clearly agreed that it bioaccumulates. Why do you pretend that I didn't?
>Consider, Argon is very much an inert gas. I
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You might be surprised to learn that waste (even that of apex predators) then gets used by plants which are eaten by herbivores and so eventually finds it's way back to the apex predator.
You apparently didn't check out all of those links to studies that were performed by various researchers connected with various institutions.
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Oh, I'm well aware of the previous understanding that mercury is basically "here forever to accumulate" that was debunked long ago.
See, if this was true, mercury would be all around us in massive quantities by now, as we've been burning coal for well in excess of a century. Of that, most of the burning was done in such a way that mercury out of the exhaust of the coal plants was spread across land, rather than sea. So basically all of the landmass in developed countries would be poisoned with mercury, resul
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You seem to have zero understanding of scale. We actually can measure the mercury deposited on the land from the coal plants. It was there and the concentration was increasing. Then we applied scrubbers to the coal plants to reduce the emissions. Since then, slowly some of the mercury has been either washed into the ocean or sequestered in rock, but it's still there. Eventually, it may even find itself re-sequestered in coal that forms from plant matter growing today, but that takes a very long time compare
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>Since then, slowly some of the mercury has been either washed into the ocean or sequestered in rock, but it's still there.
It exited the cycle. Bingo. Rest of your sophistry of "it may possibly, maybe, in a few tens of millenia find the way back" is irrelevant.
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The small amount that got sequestered in rock exited the cycle. As long as nobody is stupid enough to dig it up and release it free in the environment, it will be fine. That part that went into the ocean will be right back (things live there, we eat some of them).
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Except that again, we've done the experiment on your hypothesis, and the result is that your hypothesis is false. There's no constant concentration of mercury in the oceans with no exiting, as oceans would have been poisoned on extreme degree by historic coal emissions long ago. Much less today, with ridiculous emissions coming out of China today.
It's true that oceans do retain more of the excreted mercury in a cycle than land, which maintains near zero, as noted above. That number is still a tiny portion o
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Actually, it is your hypothesis that is invalidated since we can measure the increase in mercury and it has become enough to be a problem for sensitive populations.
Even a 5 year old knows that you can't keep adding a cup of water to a pitcher forever, eventually it will overflow.
It's bloody obvious to anyone that if you keep adding small amounts to a large container long enough you get a large amount.
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>Actually, it is your hypothesis that is invalidated since we can measure the increase in mercury and it has become enough to be a problem for sensitive populations.
Has it increased at same or even similar rate as input? No.
>Even a 5 year old knows that you can't keep adding a cup of water to a pitcher forever, eventually it will overflow.
Indeed. That is a child's understanding of this problem. Adult's understanding is that you in fact can do it forever without it ever overflowing, as long as you add
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So you're claiming the mercury and other persistent pollutants will escape into space? Wow, that's really desperate.
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Did you eat nothing but oceanic fish for last decade? Brain damage you need to make a claim this stupid after reading what I stated must be quite severe.
Yes, they totally teleport from the sediment and planetary crust into space. What else would they do, stay there..?
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Hey, at least I have more expertise in that hobby than you have in your daily job of being a Chinese propaganda troll.
You really shouldn't throw stones when you live in a house of glass.
Re: Frustrating article (Score:2)
So, they're just trying to get people to go back to formula again. Great. Fuck Moloch.
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The three important words were buried too far down the summary: Environmental Working Group. This group is a crank, fear-mongering organization [acsh.org] that looks for chemicals at incredibly small concentrations and FUDs about the effects. Per Influence Watch [influencewatch.org], "Environmental Working Group has faced substantial criticism for its sloppy scientific methods and exaggerations of toxicological risks."
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If they "don't break down", that means they don't react. By what mechanism, then, are they supposed to cause all these illnesses?
There are a variety of mechanisms. Some cause the body to react to them, some damage DNA with low levels of radioactivity, some accumulate and clog up areas, some are catalysts. You know, like mercury, like clotted arteries, like smoke/tar particles in the lungs.
This is so well and widely understand the author probably didn't think it was worth mentioning.
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There are a variety of mechanisms. Some cause the body to react to them, some damage DNA with low levels of radioactivity, some accumulate and clog up areas, some are catalysts. You know, like mercury, like clotted arteries, like smoke/tar particles in the lungs.
DNA has a self healing mechanism built into it otherwise we couldn't eat bananas. DNA itself is slightly radioactive as it contains Potassium, a small portion of which is naturally radioactive. Mercury is an element, not a chemical. Clotted (clogged) arteries is a physical mechanism as is carbon soot in the lungs (smoke).
The question was, how does something that don't participate in chemical reactions cause biological harm. And that is a good question as normally a chemical causing harm does so by part
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Animal studies show effects of PFAS on liver, endocrine, and fetal development systems, all of which depend on or are part of signalling systems that orchestrate complex biological processes. You appear to be thinking of animals as being like test tubes where you add bulk reagents which are consumed. The effects on systems like these can be more like injecting invalid messages into a computer program -- you don't need much and the compounds involved aren't necessarily used up. The classic example of this
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If they "don't break down", that means they don't react. By what mechanism, then, are they supposed to cause all these illnesses?
(Not impossible. Asbestos is unreactive, xenon is a noble gas, but one causes cancer and one is an anesthetic. They work via physics rather than chemistry).
What is the reason for a standard measured in parts per trillion? At that level, you're likely to find anything you could name in any body fluid. Toxicologists say "the dose makes the poison".
I wish science writers would ask questions like those.
You just answered your own question. If the dose makes the poison, and the dose is in parts per trillion, then you measure in that concentration.
Also, see below. "Breaking down" is not the standard by which "don't react" is judged. An enzyme, for example, does not break down but is still able to facilitate a chemical reaction, it just always persists afterwards and is not broken down or altered in the process.
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There are many chemical reactions in which one of the molecules involved is both a reactant and a product of the chemical reaction. A famous example of this is the reaction with CFCs that reduces ozone in the atmosphere.
alternatives (Score:2)
Just give those babies some formula from PFAS treated high density PE bottles instead. yum yum, polyfluoroalkyls, what kids crave!
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Yep. Might as well get used to them early, they aren't going away.
Chappelle (Score:1)
... no more Cambodian breast milk for me then.
Don't miss the documentary--may make you furious. (Score:2)
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Not really. Society has moved on and decided there are more important things to worry about than if someone thinks they are a different gender. I really don't care what set of genitals a person has or how they dress. How other people live their lives has zero effect on mine.
Re: PFAS act as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (Score:3)
He's kinda right, though. Both gender identity and sexual orientation are affected by epigenetic stuff that happens based on prenatal hormone levels. It's entirely plausible that the proportion of people with non-standard sex-related stuff would rise in proportion with microplastic contamination. It's not something you can change about a person after the fact, and it's stupid that we still treat that sort of person as scary and bad, but they're a sign of something that is a problem, because we also have dec
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At least in both ancient Greece and Rome, homosexuality was just as standard as heterosexuality. Thai lady boys [medium.com] have been around since a long time. Black Africa also had a long history of non-binary gender identities [medium.com] before European colonialism mostly wiped it out.
So while I agree the endocrine-disturbing properties of microplastics could also have an effect, I think the effect of cultural acceptance/suppression shouldn't be underestimated. Especially in terms of considering what is "standard".
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I completely agree with you; what I'm saying is more that the xenoestrogen problem is making these things loud enough in peoples' heads that they resist our social conditioning, which is a big deal.
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What I meant is indeed that there are not necessarily more people with differing gender identities or sexual orientation than there were in the past, but also that these chemicals are not necessarily the cause for them to be more open about it. It could also be because of other reasons, like the internet making it easier for (young) people to discover that they're not alone in feeling this way and hence less inclined to stay closeted and suppress their feelings.
In some ways it's perhaps a bit similar to how
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Homosexuality and gender identity confusion are orthogonal.
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I know, but the GP suggested both would be influenced by PFAS.
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They aren't completely unrelated. Among the many supposed "causes," there's at least one I know of that appears in both: some genetic thingamajig I can't remember the name of which has been observed to have such-and-such copies in straight people, and several more copies in homosexuals, and way more copies in people with gender identity issues. Similarly, both non-straights and transpeople apparently exhibit opposite-sex-typical response to pheromones, though I don't think that study showed one or the other
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Not really. Society has moved on and decided there are more important things to worry about than if someone thinks they are a different gender. I really don't care what set of genitals a person has or how they dress. How other people live their lives has zero effect on mine.
Really?
Good! I look forward to Title IX disappearing then, also "woman owned" businesses not getting preference in government contracts anymore too.
Right?
What's that ... no?
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Another ppt article? (Score:4, Insightful)
To give you an idea of how small this is:
There are about 1 trillion cells in 1 liter. This means about 50 of those cells would be filled with PFAS. Keep in mind that most people get much more arsenic in their food as the one 'flavor' of pfas were found in ~30pg per ml and high arsenic levels in blood are 12ng per ml or 12000pg per ml
Also they sampled 50 people one person had 1800ppt of PFAS, how do we know they don't chew on plastic lids? (don't chew on plastic lids) The short story is, we come into contact with mercury, arsenic, PFAS, whatever.
Re:Another ppt article? (Score:5, Insightful)
The short story is, we come into contact with mercury, arsenic, PFAS, whatever.
Sure. And the "short" result is, one in three. That's how many will now be affected by cancer.
That's increased from 1 in 100, in a little over a century. Most want to dismiss that increase due to a massive increase in technology, and we are now "blessed" with the ability to detect cancer so much more awesomely than we were before.
While they're blinding the masses with that technobabble bullshit answer, I'm still kind of stuck on the fucking obvious; one in three.
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An epidemiological analysis needs to allow for the effect of life expectancy.
If you die of smallpox at 40, of course you don't die of cancer at 70.
The 1 in 100 number was unexpected, and my reaction to a citation will be genuine gratitude. A century ago smoking was widespread.
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One in three is a figure that sums up all the causes of cancer.
This also means that cancer isn't only caused by our own bodies (which they will produce cancer on their own barring any chemicals), but also longer lifespans, smoking, bad diets, obesity ect...
I agree cancer sucks.
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This also means that cancer isn't only caused by our own bodies (which they will produce cancer on their own barring any chemicals), but also longer lifespans, smoking, bad diets, obesity ect...
That's something that isn't emphasized enough. DNA replication is far from perfect. It fails all the time, in fact. An adult male human is upwards of 30 trillion cells, give or take (35 trillion for Slashdotters). With cell lifespans as short as two days, there's plenty of opportunity for replication failure. We produce multiple cancerous cells every week. The immune system recognizes the failures and nukes them. Nearly always. It's only when either recognition fails or killing it fails that we get
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We also evolved with arsenic in the environment. It's only when those levels get higher than we evolved with that it becomes a problem.
Any amount of PFAS is more than we evolved with.
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So someone hands you a drink with 2000 times the recommended levels of PFAS and you would drink it?
I said it before (Score:1)
Fourteen atoms per trillion? (Score:2)
SOME public health advocates? (Score:3)
I find myself curious as to the identities and motivations of these "public health advocates".
Are they doctors? Scientists? Just people who'd like to think they're important? What?
Pardon me ... (Score:2)
For science.
Greenpeace got it almost right (Score:2)
If only Greenpeace wanted to ban fluoride chemistry instead of chlorine, I would have supported them.
Nature has ways of dealing with chlorine compounds, if a bit slowly in cases. Every molecule of fluorine we free from the minerals Earth was nice enough to store them in will poison us till subduction takes them away ... and using them in even more poisonous compounds than the free fluorine only makes it worse.
Industry loves ultra-stable chemical compounds, only a baseball bat to the knees will convince them
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...the free fluorine only makes it worse.
Good luck finding any free fluorine kicking about. It reacts with almost anything. Extracting free fluorine from its compounds is a difficult and dangerous process.
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Except you're only saying that because of the mind control gas that the CIA has been putting into jet fuel...
Non-stick cookware... (Score:2)
For the love of god... people stop buying non-stick cookware !
Use stainless steel or cast iron! This is going to be a result of people cooking with old non-stick cookware which is shedding the non-stick surface into the food they're cooking. People are cheapskates, so when the pan has obvious signs of the non-stick surface starting to delaminating (into their food), they just keep on using them.
And how many times are we going to repeat the cycle of using some new man-made exotic material and throw it out