Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of thousands of man-made chemicals that can be found in your food, water, clothing, and furniture. They are linked to multiple cancers, thyroid disease, liver damage, decreased fertility, asthma, allergies, and reduced vaccine response in children.
That’s why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced strict new limits on the levels of six PFAS in drinking water on Wednesday. This is the first time the agency has adopted a regulation aimed at limiting the daily exposure to PFAS that many people in the United States experience simply by staying hydrated. The EPA is giving water officials five years to test their systems, remove PFAS from water and comply with the new limits.
“This is by far the most important and difficult decision to protect drinking water in the last 30 years,” Ken Cook, president of the watchdog Environmental Working Group, told reporters about the new EPA decision.
Scientists suspect that PFAS is present in the blood of all Americans – and stays there. This is how these substances earned the nickname “forever chemicals.” They don’t break down.
“Once they enter your body, they stay for a very, very long time,” Carmen Messerlian, a professor of reproductive environmental epidemiology at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health who studies PFAS, told Business Insider in March 2023.
The exact duration of their presence is simple to calculate using a chemical rule called “half-life”.
In humans, half-life is the time it takes for your body to expel half the amount of a substance from your blood, either by urinating or absorbing it into other tissues.
The half-life of a substance can vary greatly from person to person, but studies have calculated averages. This research tells us how long PFAS can linger in our blood, compared to toxic heavy metals or everyday substances like caffeine.
This means that if you completely remove PFAS from your life — a feat that scientists consider virtually impossible — in four years, seven years, or maybe even 10 years, your body will have expelled only half of the chemicals.
This is not to say that eliminating PFAS from our bodies is a lost cause.
After bad press around two of the most notorious PFAS – perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) – U.S. manufacturers phased them out of production in the 2000s.
You can see the results in the blood of Americans. From 1999-2000 to 2017-2018, PFOA blood levels decreased by 70% and PFOS levels decreased even more, by 85%, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A woman drinks water from a street fountain, which likely contains PFAS. iStock/Getty Images Plus
“It indicates that when something is done, and when we stop using chemicals, stop releasing them into the environment, the concentrations (in our bodies) go down,” David Andrews, senior scientist studying PFAS at the environmental monitoring organization. Task Force, told BI in February 2023.
There are still thousands of other PFAS widely manufactured and used in products in the United States and around the world.
Everything from dental floss to menstrual products, food packaging and furniture spreads PFAS in the environment and into our bodies – from the day the chemical is first manufactured, to the moment you use the product, and even after you throw it away.
Regulating six of these chemicals in U.S. drinking water is just the beginning of solving the problem.
“We’re really just covering the tip of the iceberg,” Messerlian said.
“We need these chemicals to stop circulating in our environments by preventing them from being present in the food production chain and in the product production chain,” she added.
Catherine Boudreau contributed to this story.
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