Most people today have heard of PFAS, which stands for per- and polyfluoralkyl substances. This is a group of over 1000 different chemicals that were made specifically to stand up to harsh environments so that they don’t break down due to heat, cold, oils, or other common agents.

PFAS chemicals are found in many different products today, including some fabrics, food packaging, jet engines, non-stick cookware, and much more. While the chemicals are very durable, that doesn’t mean that they stay in place at all times. These chemicals can get dislodged from their original location and left behind in the surrounding environment, which is exactly what has been happening in the decades since they were invented. The end result is that they are found in nearly all parts of the environment, including the food and water that we drink. For this reason, almost everyone has these ‘forever chemicals’ in their body, where they will stay for the rest of their life.

Unfortunately, these chemicals have been linked to a variety of health problems over the years, which most people have only found out about recently because of a massive cover-up from DuPont and 3M, which are the companies that create the chemicals.

In a 2023 study, researchers working at UC San Francisco and the University of Colorado took the time to dig into internal documents from the two companies that were released due to a lawsuit. The documents spanned 45 years, from 1961 until 2006. These documents, and the lawsuit that prompted their release, are the basis of the 2019 movie, Dark Waters.

In a statement, the senior author of the paper, Tracey J. Woodruff, who is a professor and director of the UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, said:

“These documents reveal clear evidence that the chemical industry knew about the dangers of PFAS and failed to let the public, regulators, and even their own employees know the risks.”

The documents make it clear that the companies knew that there were real risks associated with the chemicals and various types of exposure to them. One example of this comes from 1980, where it was found that two women who worked with the production of one of the PFAS chemicals (C8) gave birth to children with birth defects. This is out of 8 women total who gave birth while working in that area.

Despite the fact that the documents proved that the company knew about these defects, the company later told internal employees that there wasn’t a risk and even compared the toxicity of C8 to that of table salt.

In 2004, DuPont received a fine from the EPA and had to pay $16.45 million due to the way it handled these chemicals. While that was at the time the largest civil penalty ever under environmental law in the USA, it is almost nothing compared to the approximate $1 billion per year in revenue generated from the chemicals in question.

Woodruff went on to say the following about the paper:

“As many countries pursue legal and legislative action to curb PFAS production, we hope they are aided by the timeline of evidence presented in this paper. This timeline reveals serious failures in the way the US currently regulates harmful chemicals.”

When companies have a profit motive to hide any dangerous aspects of the chemicals (or other products) that they make, it can be expected that this is the type of thing that they will do. Many people support laws that would make penalties for this type of cover-up or the continued production of harmful products so severe that companies would never consider it.

For now, however, that is not the case, and it is very likely that there are many other examples of this type of cover-up going on with other products in the US and around the world.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?