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Earth Science

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.

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Study Finds Alarming Levels of 'Forever Chemicals' In US Mothers' Breast Milk

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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 qu

    • by larwe ( 858929 )

      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.

      • by jemmyw ( 624065 )
        <quote><p>Simplistic. A catalyst does not break down. Nor does it react. It accelerates... one might even say <i>catalyzes</i> reactions that would be very slow or not occur at all in the absence of said catalyst.</p></quote>

        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.
        • by larwe ( 858929 ) on Sunday May 16, 2021 @12:42AM (#61389494)
          I am trying to think of how to out-pedant this, but I believe you have checkmated me. I concede, and give you one internet.
          • by jemmyw ( 624065 ) on Sunday May 16, 2021 @12:52AM (#61389508)
            Considering I expected your reply to be the usual veiled insult, I graciously return your internet for gentlemanly behaviour.
          • 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.

            • by Anonymous Coward
              Pedantic does not mean correct. A pedantic answer can also be simplistic. As a person who deals in abstract creative problem solving, many times I cannot say the exact mechanism I believe a problem to be occurring, but instead use an an analogous example. I might say "a race condition in this piece of code, like these memory operations not happening as expected". I might be wrong about the exactness of how it occurs, but 100% correct about where it is occurring and the nature of the problem.

              Professionally
        • 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.

    • by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Sunday May 16, 2021 @12:52AM (#61389510)
      Mercury doesn't break down, but causes birth defects.
      • 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]

        • Yeah. That's my point. GP was saying there's some kind of contradiction between "break down" and "react". If something can react (literally, as you said, "chemical reaction") without breaking down, then the linguistic dilemma is solved.
          • by sfcat ( 872532 )
            When a chemical breaks down that usually means it reacted with something to form something(s) with a lower Gibbs free energy. Usually, if a chemical doesn't react, it won't take part in biological processes and thus will be biologically inert. That means it is "safe". However, there are ways a chemical can be harmful but not take part in a reaction. These are rare and I'm sure the relevant scientists would find them interesting just because they are not common. This is one of those non common cases. S
    • 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.

      • by sfcat ( 872532 )
        You can only "break-down" molecules, not elements. Cadmium is an element and thus won't break down. It can react with another element to form something stable and biologically useful or inert but that's not the same thing. These forever chemicals are not elements. What they are is something with such a low Gibbs free energy that it is almost impossible to get these types of molecules to react and become a different set of types of molecules. That would be "breaking down" a molecule. Also, most toxic m
    • True. In addition, "they don't break down" doesn't equate "they accumulate in your body forever". They could be excreted with the usual means. The fact itself that they were found in human milk shows that they *have* a way to leave the human body.
      • Yes the chemicals leave people individually, but remain cycling in the local ecosystem indefinitely so keep entering the body as fast as leaving it.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          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

          • 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.

            • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              This assumes that every novel chemical is harmful.

              Again, self evidently false for reasons mentioned above.

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            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

            • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              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

              • by sjames ( 1099 )

                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

                • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                  >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

                  • by sjames ( 1099 )

                    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.

                    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      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

                    • by sjames ( 1099 )

                      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

                    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      >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.

                    • by sjames ( 1099 )

                      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).

                    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      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

                    • by sjames ( 1099 )

                      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.

                    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      >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

                    • by sjames ( 1099 )

                      So you're claiming the mercury and other persistent pollutants will escape into space? Wow, that's really desperate.

                    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      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..?

    • So, they're just trying to get people to go back to formula again. Great. Fuck Moloch.

    • by Entrope ( 68843 )

      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."

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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.

      • by sfcat ( 872532 )

        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

    • I look for the good man. I would be your Mistress!! Punish me! =>> http://gg.gg/oobp4 [gg.gg]
    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      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

    • I do agree, at that concentration level you will find unobtainioum (sp?). Regardless, if the stuff is hazardous simply come up with a chelating agent to remove it from Mommie; or something for the kiddie that helps its removal. 'Cause despite all the whinging about a contaminated planet, these sorts of chemicals are out there and there to stay.
    • 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.

    • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      At high enough concentrations, they start to get in the way of other biological reactions. Helium is inert but at high enough concentrations can cause issues.
    • 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.

  • Just give those babies some formula from PFAS treated high density PE bottles instead. yum yum, polyfluoroalkyls, what kids crave!

  • ... no more Cambodian breast milk for me then.

  • George Miller released a compelling piece about this back in 2015. Here's a relevant clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
  • by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Sunday May 16, 2021 @01:50AM (#61389572)

    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.

    • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Sunday May 16, 2021 @05:02AM (#61389826)

      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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

        • 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

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      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.

    • So someone hands you a drink with 2000 times the recommended levels of PFAS and you would drink it?

  • Time to trot out the first post I ever made on /.. This was about estrogen mimicking chemicals in plastics: What this really means is that us old guys have bigger dicks than all you young wise asses. Now get off my lawn, pansies.
  • Fourteen atoms per trillion is the recommended limit? Hell, why not make it seven and get 50% more protection from this unknown evil?
  • by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Sunday May 16, 2021 @08:54AM (#61390158)

    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?

  • ... while I collect some more samples.

    For science.

  • 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

    • ...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.

    • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

      If only Greenpeace wanted to ban fluoride chemistry instead of chlorine, I would have supported them.

      Except you're only saying that because of the mind control gas that the CIA has been putting into jet fuel...

  • 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

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