An environmental watchdog group warns that perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), an industrial chemical linked to health problems that is being phased out but still persists in the nation’s drinking water, may be a more far serious threat to health than previously believed.
In a just-released report, the Washington, DC-based Environmental Working Group says that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reporting limit for PFOA is “hundreds or thousands of times too weak.” The organization is urging EPA to tighten its acceptable limits.
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“Every time they drink a glass of tap water, people in the mid-Ohio River Valley of West Virginia and Ohio may be consuming unsafe amounts of an industrial chemical linked to cancer, birth defects, heart disease and other illness,” wrote the report’s authors, EWG investigations editor Bill Walker and senior scientist David Andrews. “More than a decade after this threat became known, government regulators have failed to set enforceable standards to ensure the water is safe — and now, new science says the danger may be much greater than either residents or regulators thought.”
The report’s assertions are built upon another study by Harvard School of Public Health environmental epidemiologist Philippe Grandjean and his colleague Richard Clapp from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, published last week in the environmental and occupational health journal New Solutions. Those researchers contend that the current federal limits on PFOA were based upon old data, collected prior to 2008.
According to EPA nationwide monitoring data compiled by EWG, PFOA has been detected in water systems in 27 states. California residents are being exposed to as much as 117 times the more stringent standard proposed by Grandjean and Clapp, while Colorado residents are getting 132 times the scientists’ proposed new limit, and West Virginia residents are being exposed to 174 times that threshold.
PFOA is an industrial chemical that has been used to make nonstick materials such as the coatings for cookware. According to a 2010 article in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives, the chemical doesn’t break down when it gets into the environment, and most people have it in their bodies, probably as a result of drinking water contamination.
In 2012, a scientific panel appointed in litigation against one of the manufacturers, DuPont Co., found a “probable link” between exposure and six human diseases, including kidney and testicular cancer. The scientists studied 70,000 residents of the Mid-Ohio Valley, where DuPont used the chemical in manufacturing. That litigation, which now includes 3,500 suits by residents, is continuing against a DuPont spinoff company, Chemours, according to a corporate presentation.
Because of concerns about PFOA’s potential for harm, in 2006 EPA entered into an agreement with eight major chemical companies to phase out its use by the end of 2015.
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