I searched this article for specific evidence of PFAS-related harms. What I found was
- PFAS increases liver and kidney weight of rats (in unspecified conditions)
- PFAS can kill monkeys (in some unspecified large dose)
- A baby was born with birth defects near a DuPont plant manufacturing PFAS (no further information, just this n=1 coincidence)
- PFAS was associated with a decrease in post-vaccination immune response to certain vaccines (in one small observational study? how did they come up with this, I thought it was disrupting the liver? smells of HARK-ing and p-hacking.)
All the rest of the article's words are devoted to theoretical speculation and background, much of it entirely unrelated (e.g. the Faroe Islands mercury studies, which seem to have provided much stronger evidence of harm than they have for PFAS). The article suggests that, if you believed all the research about the harms of PFAS, you would think they were a sort of all-powerful super-contaminant. This sounds suspicious to me rather than credible.
Clearly we need more research, and I'm philosophically opposed to contaminating the environment with weird forever chemicals as much as anyone else. But I'm struggling to understand what we know now that scares us so much. Could PFAS concerns be partly some kind of enviro-moral panic?
- PFAS increases liver and kidney weight of rats (in unspecified conditions)
- PFAS can kill monkeys (in some unspecified large dose)
- A baby was born with birth defects near a DuPont plant manufacturing PFAS (no further information, just this n=1 coincidence)
- PFAS was associated with a decrease in post-vaccination immune response to certain vaccines (in one small observational study? how did they come up with this, I thought it was disrupting the liver? smells of HARK-ing and p-hacking.)
All the rest of the article's words are devoted to theoretical speculation and background, much of it entirely unrelated (e.g. the Faroe Islands mercury studies, which seem to have provided much stronger evidence of harm than they have for PFAS). The article suggests that, if you believed all the research about the harms of PFAS, you would think they were a sort of all-powerful super-contaminant. This sounds suspicious to me rather than credible.
Clearly we need more research, and I'm philosophically opposed to contaminating the environment with weird forever chemicals as much as anyone else. But I'm struggling to understand what we know now that scares us so much. Could PFAS concerns be partly some kind of enviro-moral panic?