The Forever Chemical Scandal | Bloomberg Investigates

Here we are in the Faroe Islands, a remote community in the North Atlantic. We have been living off fishing for hundreds of years. We do not produce

chemical

s, but we are exposed to many

chemical

s. They came to us without asking us. We have seen negative effects on the health of our children. We want to see their development because we have always been a little suspicious if these substances can have any impact on the endocrine system. This is the price to pay for what international society has done without thinking about the consequences of simply releasing new substances.

What we have seen here in the Faroe Islands is that this is part of an absolutely global contamination that may have started in the 1960s, without us being aware of it. PFAS is everywhere. PFAS have contaminated our food supply and PFAS can also accumulate in soils and sediments. Chemists who have taken samples of rainwater in Antarctica and the Himalayas, what do they find in the rainwater? PFAS. It's over. Not only do they remain in the environment, in our water, in our soil, but they reach living beings and remain in us. It is like a time bomb in the body, as these things accumulate and cover all our organs and remain there year after year.

We have analyzed thousands and thousands of human blood samples. We've never met one that didn't contain PFAS. We have all paid a high price as large corporations carelessly dump known toxic chemicals. Through no fault of my own, I was exposed to these toxic chemicals and as a result, I will die with this cancer. We have all been used as guinea pigs for the last 70 or 80 years. They didn't tell us that we were exposed, even though the companies knew that these things, if we put them in these products, they will reach people. They will enter the blood of the people.

But they did it anyway. It's hard to even talk to people about these chemicals and say, look, there's a chemical inside you that's not found anywhere in nature. These chemicals are found in 99% of people. It just sounds crazy. Telling people that these are also

forever

chemicals, that we have created a chemical that we don't know how to destroy, sounds even stranger. So, PFAS are man-made synthetic chemicals. PFAS stands for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. It's quite a mouthful. It is an acronym that represents a family of thousands of different chemicals. The EPA's most recent estimate says there are more than 14,000 different chemical structures they recognize as PFAS.

They share the same chemical property of having many carbon-fluorine bonds. These carbon-fluorine bonds are some of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry. For this reason, PFAS have also been called "

forever

chemicals," because those carbon-fluorine bonds don't actually break. But the part where this story gets really strange is when you look at their origins, because these chemicals came from the Manhattan Project, which was a secret project to build the atomic bomb in World War II. So after the war, companies began experimenting with these chemicals. One company had a scientist who accidentally splashed some on his canvas shoes.

They discovered that the chemicals had stain- and water-proof properties. That company was 3M. Due to their unique chemical properties, they are added to products to make them non-stick, grease, stain and water resistant. You already know who is going to win this contest. Teflon is much easier to clean than stainless steel or uncoated aluminum. These chemicals were used in some of this company's most famous products, such as 3M's Scotchgard and DuPont's Teflon. These chemicals were really at the dawn of what we think of as the era of better living through chemistry, and they sort of embodied this attitude of consumers and businesses that everything we do could become more convenient. ...on virtually any fabric!

Use Scotchgard fabric protector and let the cup spill. And consumers are still truly enjoying the fruits of this era. When you look around, there are so many things that are stain-proof or waterproof, like grease-resistant pizza boxes or microwave popcorn bags. They are in industrial applications such as plastics and semiconductors. They could even be used in solar panels and wind turbines. They are in many products and it is not even clear why they are there, like toilet paper or dental floss. But as time has passed and more scientific research on them has progressed, we have realized that they also have a disadvantage.

We are east of Minneapolis in Minnesota, near the 3M World Headquarters. In 2018, I began looking at 3M's history with PFAS chemicals. I wrote a story at that time. A lot has changed since then and I've gone back to see what happened. In 3M's hometown of Cottage Grove, Minnesota, and the surrounding areas of Oakdale and Lake Elmo, the company had been dumping these chemicals since the 1960s. And clearly these chemicals got out into the environment, seeped underground, they entered the aquifers, they entered the soil, and that's really the beginning of this gigantic plume that was later documented around the 3M site in Cottage Grove.

The contamination has caused concern among residents of the area. There are worrying statistics about childhood cancer, which is believed to be more related to environmental pollutants. Hello. Hello how are you doing? Hello. What are those burgers like? Excellent! I'm a wonderful griller, obviously. Do you have a plate to put them on? That probably would have been something I should have taken too. My God, mother. I have the other one. In 2018 I interviewed several local residents, including Amy and her daughter Lexi. I was so happy to get back in touch with you and hear that Lexi has made a full recovery.

So how many years did that take and... Having finished treatment and all that to be completely cancer free, it took me five years after I was treated? So when did she start to suspect it might be an environmental problem? I drank city water growing up, hence City of Oakdale Water. And then when I was pregnant with Lexi, her father and I moved to an apartment in Oakdale and lived there until she was two or three and all her bottles were made with water. So we don't buy filtered water. I don't think it was as common as it is now.

In my opinion, I don't really remember people having water bottles. It was more of a luxury. People didn't want to spend money on it. I mean, do you ever think about eating fish from the lake or anything else that might have put her at greater risk? Yes, I have been eating fish since the day I was about a year old. Since the day I could chew, my grandfather has made me eat fish. From the lakes around here? Yes. My dad, his grandfather, is a professional fishing guide. Oh, wow. He loves fish and he loves to go fishing and come home and make big fries.

And yes, they live right around here. It's about a six-minute drive from here. So all the lakes I would go to would be Lake Demontreville, Lake Jane, all of the Lake Elmo ones. My dad is much more demanding now if he is really going to keep them. Not everyone was as lucky as Lexi. Death records show that a child who died in Oakdale between 2003 and 2015 was 171% more likely to have had cancer compared to those who lived outside the contaminated area. So in that area, one of the schools was Tartan High School. And there was a math teacher there who told me that the numbers just didn't add up.

There were so many students who seemed to have rare cancers, so many teachers who had family members with cancer. And one of the most outspoken students about it was Amara Strande. I am 20 years old and at 15 I was diagnosed with stage four fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma. I have had over 20 surgeries, including two liver resections and open chest surgery. There are no more treatments to try, no roadmap or plan. So this is your bedroom? Bedroom. Or just your meeting place? No, this is his bedroom. No, this was his bedroom. The reason there is no bed here is because it was a hospital bed and we had to give it back to the hospice.

It's from the hospice. Yes. Amara was diagnosed with cancer at age 15 and she died just two days before her 21st birthday in April 2023. What she is most proud of is her music studies. I study her music. Wow, how many different instruments do you have here? I see a violin. There's a ukulele, her mandolin. There might be a harmonica or a kazoo somewhere in there. Her first love was music. She was a composer. She had written songs. Her dream career was to write music, compose music for computer games or even soundtracks for films. And could she continue composing even while she was sick?

She was composing until a few days before she died. Yes. But she couldn't sing anymore. She had this large mass removed that had grown on the fibers of her liver, the fibrolamellar variety of liver cancer. Fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma is a cancer found in one in five million people. It's very weird. Did any doctors along the way say they thought there might be an environmental cause for the cancer or suggest any lifestyle changes? That wasn't her concern. Her concern was facing cancer as they understood it. It wasn't until much later that Amara began to question how this could happen to her.

And she started asking those questions because she was a student at Tartan and there were so many other cancers there? Absolutely. I mean, she was aware of the community's concern about PFAS. It was something that kids talked about at school and even joked about, you know, as much as you can joke, you know, "Don't drink the water here." "Don't drink the water of cancer." Yes. While they were talking about it. She met kids whose parents had cancer and then met kids whose siblings had cancer. She wanted to know, why doesn't anyone know about this? Why don't people ask questions?

Although Amara and Lexi's mother Amy believes these cancers are related to PFAS chemicals, it is very difficult to prove. Years of research are needed both at the population level and, in particular, when analyzing an individual. But fears about the water were intensified by what would happen in the 2010s. Minnesota sued 3M for harming the state's natural resources with its PFAS dumping, and in doing so, a trove of internal company documents were made public. company. What they revealed has been described as a scientific cover-up. Looking at the documents that they told 3M in 1975, we believe that we are finding their chemicals, these perfluorinated materials, in the blood of the general population of the United States.

And to see what was going on internally, you know, 3M started testing their own workers and found that yes, this chemical is accumulating in workers who were exposed to this chemical. They were seeing studies of these chemicals in animals with disturbing effects. It shows that in 1997, 3M gave DuPont a material safety data sheet with a label that said: "Cancer: Warning: Contains a chemical that may cause cancer." But 3M removed that label that same year and for decades sold PFAS without warning the public about its dangers. You see companies debating internally. Do we say something? Should we tell the government?

And unfortunately what they decided was no. Some 3M documents even showed that there had been some kind of whistleblower within the company named Richard Purdy who had said that the company did not inform its customers about the risks of these chemicals, and he resigned. He referred to 3M's PFOS, or P-F-O-S, as the most insidious contaminant since PCBs. Some of the most notorious PFAS are PFOS and PFOA. These are two PFAS molecules that have a carbon backbone with eight carbon atoms. These are the chemicals that have so far raised the most concern. These are the ones that appear most frequently in the environment.

These are also the ones that appear most frequently on people's bodies. They have a blood half-life of years, meaning it would take years or decades for blood levels to drop to an unmeasurable level. In fact, the 3M company had had one of their own scientists sit down and calculate what would be a safe level in human blood, and that scientist had calculated, and they even used the word "safe" in the headline of the document, that the safe level The level of this chemical in human blood would not be higher than 1.05 parts per billion. At that time, in the late 1990s, the average level of that chemical found in the blood of the general U.S. population was 30 times higher.

In 2018, 3M settled, but there was no admission that it had done anything wrong, that there had been a scientific cover-up, or what the real risk of these chemicals was. 3M to pay $850 million to settle allegations it contaminated Minnesota waterduring decades. It's hard to talk about in our community because everyone loves 3M, right? There isn't a single person I know personally from 3M who isn't a stellar person. I feel torn inside, but I'm really angry at whoever, on any level, did what he did, especially after they knew the chemicals were dangerous and continued to do it. So no one even knew what these chemicals were until this lawyer from Ohio came along.

His name is Rob Bilott and he took on the case of a farmer who had these cows downstream from a DuPont factory that were dying. Is incredible. That calf has died miserable. And so, Rob Bilott's story is now being told in the movie "Dark Waters," where he is played by Mark Ruffalo. DuPont is knowingly poisoning 70,000 local residents over the past 40 years. That's not what I was trained to do. That wasn't the kind of thing he normally did at the time. In fact, I was working with chemical companies and large corporate clients, helping them navigate all the federal, state, and international laws, rules, regulations, and things that go out into the environment.

In fact, it was through that case that we took on in 1998 that we first discovered that these man-made chemicals that we now call PFAS, forever chemicals, even existed. What we're seeing is not only that we're finding all of these potential human health impacts, but we're also seeing them occur at lower and lower dose levels and lower and lower exposure levels. Recently, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency came out and basically said, if you can detect this, it's a health problem. Safety advisories are getting lower and lower. From 70 parts per billion of PFOA and PFOS in drinking water in 2016, the EPA reduced it to just four parts per billion each.

That's less than a drop in an Olympic-sized pool. Every time those levels are reduced, it means more people live in an area where contaminated water is believed to be a problem. A recent study found that up to 200 million people drink water with higher than acceptable levels of PFAS. That's about two-thirds of Americans. States are taking action and one of those states is Minnesota. They are taking no chances with PFAS found in drinking water. And to do this, they are testing new types of water filters. PFAS are in the environment and will spread as far as water can.

He's out of the barn, out the door. This waterway carries PFAS right where air meets water, and these little bubbles are kind of signs that there might be PFAS in that water. PFAS have a hydrophobic and hydrophilic nature. So if you think of it like a caterpillar, the head of the caterpillar is hydrophilic. He wants to be in the water. And its tail wants to be out of the water, it's hydrophobic, so it surfs. And so it actually has that property that it behaves the same way in the environment on its own, or whether you put it in water or in a pan, it will behave the same way.

Then Mother Nature says: here's the PFAS, it's in the foam. And so we want to take advantage of that and do as much elimination as possible. It's called SAFF. It is surface activated foam fractionation. We fill them with contaminated water and then we can physically remove the PFAS by foaming and adding air to the system. And then we again remove the PFAS from that foam, and that's where we get a small volume of liquid that contains very concentrated PFAS. So far, testing has shown us that we can remove approximately 92-98% of PFOA and PFOS. You could run at least 60,000 gallons of water treatment per day, and this is just a small system.

So this is effectively the test to see if we can scale this up to very large volumes and if we can apply it in a permanent location to completely reduce PFAS in the environment. It's not just 3M or DuPont that are responsible for PFAS contamination. There are about a dozen companies that have produced PFAS around the world. Highly concentrated levels have been found in Europe, Japan and Australia. It has become a multi-billion dollar problem worldwide. Like the United States, many of these sites are places where chemicals are manufactured or sites where other companies use them. One of the most widespread sources is military bases and airports, where firefighting foams containing PFOS from 3M were sprayed directly on the ground.

Let's just go this way. So you're here to have your blood drawn? Yes. Very well, then come with me here. I have come to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York to have my blood drawn and tested for a variety of PFAS. There we will give you a little warning. Small stroke. All used in different products and manufactured all over the world. We know that these chemicals are everywhere and in everyone, and the question is, obviously, what level of them is unsafe? It's something science is still trying to figure out. Personally, I have wondered if I could avoid these chemicals as well.

PFAS, like many other chemicals, can bioaccumulate, meaning it sort of moves up the food chain and becomes more concentrated in predators and apex predators. And one of the places where a lot of cutting-edge research is being done is, surprisingly, the Faroe Islands. This small archipelago in the North Atlantic has a population of just over 50,000 people. No chemicals are manufactured here. There is the peculiarity of the local culture that people have eaten whale meat for generations. And whale meat can contain highly concentrated levels of chemicals. Pilot whales are something of a gift from nature because over the centuries we have caught them in the hundreds and around thousands per year.

They were seen as truly a godsend, almost from heaven. I went out into the public saying that pregnant women, especially, or women who were intending to get pregnant, should be very careful about eating pilot whale meat. Dr. Pal Weihe and his team discovered that mercury was reaching the local population through whale meat and other seafood. Scientists have studied the Faroese since the 1980s. Okay. From time to time a new cohort of hundreds of children under one year of age is added to the research. Their physical and mental development is examined until adulthood. He seems to hear well with both ears.

They are tested on things like balance, reaction time, body composition, and lung and heart function. Even the antibodies in your blood. As the Faroese reduced their consumption of pilot whale, scientists observed that mercury levels in their blood decreased over time. But unlike mercury, PFAS chemicals are in everything. In the Faroe Islands people have stain-resistant sofas and waterproof jackets, just like the rest of us. Even in people who had very low levels of chemicals, scientists began to detect things that really worried them. What we saw surprised us a lot. And we saw that the negative effect on antibody formation was much greater in children exposed to PFAS than to PCP and other substances.

The people of the Faroe Islands were far from pollution and were exposed to these compounds at concentrations that we thought were very low. And yet we found that every time a child had a doubled concentration of PFAS in his blood, he lost half the antibody. Basically, the vaccines didn't work. It means there is a flaw, a weakness, in your immune system. It is not working optimally. We can see that children who have greater exposure have a weaker skeleton. And there is a tendency to develop what we call prediabetes at an early age. Okay, I'm just doing the last test.

So, as these studies evolve and we learn more about the links between high levels of PFAS and health problems, how close are we to understanding how much is too much? Cancer experts at the World Health Organization believe that if you do not have an optimally functioning immune system, you may be more vulnerable to cancer. So we can see the various diseases that are in a way triggered, if not facilitated. I would call this a multi-organ toxicant, PFAS. Affects multiple targets. And it may be that each PFAS chooses its favorite toxicity. We're trying to figure that out.

One of the most disturbing things that persists as a scientific problem with PFAS is that there is no known way to remove them from our bodies. There is only one way known and, unfortunately, it is through mothers who give birth. They are transmitting their PFAS to their children, both at birth and during breastfeeding. And this has huge implications not only for our generation, but also for generations to come, as we are passing these PFAS on to our children. Elsa Helmsdael is both a scientist who studies PFAS, a person who has been through cohorts, and a mother who has had to deal with PFAS on a very personal level.

I thought about it a lot and decided to only breastfeed for six months, although the recommendation is to breastfeed for a year. Wow. Did it seem strange to think about being previously contaminated or sharing your contamination with your child? Yes Yes. If he did. And also, because I didn't know my own levels, and a lot of contaminants, in this case, PFAS, are actually given to children, so their levels go up a lot and your levels go down as a result of breastfeeding. I didn't think about it much when I was tested, but I do think about it a lot when it comes to my kids.

We are beginning to understand that exposures early in life can change the configuration of our chromosomes. So the question is: is it something that can affect future generations if we contaminate or expose currently pregnant women? If we contaminate or expose currently pregnant women? And this has been shown in rodent studies to happen. The pesticide is completely gone, but the change in DNA chemistry is not. PFAS are not just a problem for humans. The chemicals have been detected in animals for decades, from polar bears in the Arctic to dolphins in India. In the Faroe Islands they are also studying the impact on wildlife.

Ornithologist Sjúrður Hammer is analyzing its effects, both on seabirds and on ecosystems as a whole. We're pretty sure that the PFAS we find in seabirds, for the most part, come from their diet. There is important research done recently on how pollutants have a negative impact on top predators in particular, where you see high concentrations, and that has a knock-on effect, it could be a parasite load, but it could also be their chance of contracting infections or surviving a pandemic, such as bird flu. So if we lost an apex predator like the great skua, what would be the ecological consequences?

Ecologically, top predators are very important in stabilizing the ecosystem. They have a sort of top-down, controlling effect on the ecosystem. Are there any other ecological consequences for these particular birds from having PFAS or other chemicals? Very often we look for sublethal effects. They may have more subtle effects on your reproduction, for example. And also in relation to PFAS, there are indications that mothers transmit it to their eggs. So there is also what we call maternal transfer. Just like with humans. Yes. We have documented some of the negative consequences and sent you the message. Please learn your lesson.

It may be irresponsible to simply invent some new substances, produce them, and ship them without any controls. As more has been learned about the health dangers of these chemicals, PFAS regulation has actually improved. It is forcing chemical companies to settle scores. They are seeing settlements in lawsuits that run into tens of billions of dollars. While claims that PFAS chemicals cause cancer have been litigated elsewhere, there has never been a major trial in Minnesota. Skeptics say the state's drinking water contains other contaminants, but many people who live in areas with high levels of PFAS still question 3M's role.

Even since the 2018 agreement, Minnesota is still figuring out how to deal with PFAS. The PFAS legislation that we have, this year we called it "Amara Law." Non-essential use will be prohibited. It will require labeling of any products containing PFAS. These manufacturers presented themselves wanting to be considered essential. That's how we discovered that there were all these products that contained PFAS, because they wanted to be on the essential list. We didn't know how much PFAS chemicals were in different products. We continue to learn more every day about the thousands of products that contained these chemicals. And at the same time, how would we know?

It's not in the ingredients, it's not in what's used to make this particular shampoo or this particular floss. We need stricter regulations on the use of PFAS chemicals and more research on the long-term effects of exposure. We also need moreEducate the public about the dangers of these chemicals, so people can make informed decisions about the products they use. His voice in the legislature was a voice for the community. They watched her as she weakened. I saw her becoming clearer, in many ways, stronger than she had ever been. She was an advocate for us this year, raising awareness about this issue.

Unfortunately, she passed away, I think it was three days before we had the bill on the floor for the first time. All Amara was asking when testifying on Capitol Hill was for the companies that use these chemicals to do the right thing and take responsibility for their use. To me, her life doesn't seem to be over because she sets a lot of things in motion, and those things are still in motion. And for me she's not done yet. Therefore, there is reason to be optimistic about our exposure to PFAS. Around 2006, the EPA pressured companies to get rid of them.

And so, these long-chain PFAS, like PFOA and PFOS, which we know so much about are harmful to health, have been largely phased out since then. However, there has been a problem. Unfortunately, these chemical companies not only removed PFAS, they replaced them. One of the most studied and well-known is a chemical manufactured by DuPont and its subsidiary Chemours for Teflon. Instead of making C8, they started making C6, something we now call GenX. They changed the name. Now GenX is found in drinking water supplies. And what did we see? GenX caused exactly the same three tumors in rats as PFOA, C8.

Exactly the same. Liver, testicular, pancreatic. Red flags went up within the scientific community saying, wait a minute, we need to pay close attention to the rest of these PFAS chemicals, these replacements. Although they may be chemically different, they have largely the same toxicity and share many of the same characteristics. Maybe we should approach them all as a group, as a class. And that's what we've seen emerge now: the only way we can get around this regulation one at a time is to address them all within a group. There could be thousands of additional PFAS chemicals in our environment, Rob Bilott is filing another class action lawsuit against several PFAS producers.

It could potentially involve the entire population of the United States. We have more than enough evidence, it is time to move forward and act to protect the American public. Thank you. Just think about this. If there really are 12,000 or more PFAS, how long would it take us to do all these studies that these manufacturers say we would need? We would all be gone when that happens. If companies are going to say there is not enough data, they should have to pay for the studies to be done. How do we short circuit this? So I filed a new case in 2018 in federal court in Ohio and the companies immediately sought an appeal, saying it was too big.

No one had ever had a class-action lawsuit this large, involving millions and millions of people. And our argument was that no one else has contaminated the entire United States and put chemicals in the blood of everyone in the country. This case is that big because the damage is that big. That's why I always knew I would have PFAS in my blood. Like everyone, I have been exposed to them. I was hoping they would be slightly lower than average, since I have known for years where these chemicals are and I live in an area that does not have high levels of PFAS in the water.

I would say that overall you are above average for someone your age. So you have higher than average PFAS levels. Any PFAS in particular? The best assays actually only measure about a dozen of these chemicals. So it's always a bit of an incomplete picture. But we do know that some of them are found more frequently than others. Therefore, the two most common are PFAS and PFOA. So we're actually a little bit on the high side for PFAS and just below the 50th percentile for PFOA. These risks are relatively low, I don't think you should rush to get tested, but the next time you visit your doctor for your annual checkup, you can order a liver function test, you can order a thyroid function test. .

I made a lot of Scotchgard shoes 10 years ago. Actually it could be that. This one has a particularly long half-life, so it might actually have made it. We are a chemical society and, you know, we are exposed to these chemicals. Now, they're not highly toxic in the sense that, you know, if you're exposed, you're definitely going to get cancer or immune problems, but they do increase the risk and all the other things in your life that can increase. the risk simply adds to that, including your genetic susceptibility. Knowing that my PFAS levels were high shows that we cannot avoid these chemicals, even if we try to make very informed decisions as consumers.

It raises an issue that I have talked about with people in the human rights field who say that our right to be born unpolluted should be a human rights issue. Fortunately, there are a growing number of scientists and private companies looking for solutions. Some have even managed to break the permanent links of PFAS. But realistically, these solutions are a long way off and will cost a lot of money. And it's not like we can stop making PFAS entirely. They are found in some really important products, such as stents, medical devices, and semiconductors. The next challenge will really be deciding which uses are essential and which ones we can live without.

Consumers also have to choose whether they are willing to live without some of the amenities. You know, are we willing to get our feet wet and wear leather shoes that haven't been waterproofed? Are we willing to have fabrics on our sofas that get stained? I think it's very difficult to think about a PFAS-free future. I don't know if that can ever be achieved. Unfortunately, people can't really make informed decisions about PFAS because of the corporate secrecy that surrounded them for decades. Scientists often say that if they had seen some of these companies' internal documents decades ago, the world would be much further along in understanding PFAS.

When we asked people, did you know you could be exposed to PFAS? People don't know. They ask, what is PFAS? That is, we have not informed people that we are essentially exposing them to these toxic substances. We don't ask their permission. This could have been avoided. This could have been avoided decades and decades ago. Millions of people could have avoided the exposures we now face. What I am saying as a doctor, I believe that we are doing something in society that is affecting the ethics of our health system because we are allowing chemical exposure to reach the general population, and that is affecting our health and, even worse, the of the next generation. health.

In my community I have seen neighbors and friends who have also been affected by these toxic chemicals. This is not just an individual problem, it is a community problem and it is time to take action.