Manufacturers of Eternal Chemicals deliberately concealed their harmfulness

The tobacco industry knew that its activity seriously harmed public health. This did not prevent him from producing ever more cigarettes. The oil and gas companies knew, for their part, that their products were going to put the firefire to the planet. They have not, however, restricted their sales volumes by fuelsfuels fossils. Never two without three, the saying goes. And indeed today, history seems to want to repeat itself once again. Researchers from the University of California (United States) reveal that the chemical industry has cleverly hidden what it knows about the toxicitytoxicity PFASs.

PFAS are those that are also known by the very evocative name of “eternal chemicals”. More than 4,700 perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyls found in our clothes, in our household products or even in our food preparations. Nicknamed so because they are extremely persistent both in the environment and in the human body. And the worst thing is that they can cause health problems such as skin disease. thyroidthyroid, obesityobesity or cancercancer.

According to researchers who analyzed documents from DuPont – a chemical giant to whom we owe nylon, Teflon and even Lycra – and 3M – the inventor of Scotch -, these manufacturers knew the dangers of PFAS and have chosen not to inform the public or the regulatorsregulators, or even their own employees. The studies they conducted showed the adverse health effects of Eternal Chemicals for at least 21 years before they were made public.

Evidence to support actions to limit the production of PFAS

To keep their secret, chemical manufacturers have systematically classified their studies “confidential”sometimes even indicating that they “wanted the documents to be destroyed”. But 45 years of those records were exposed in a 2018 lawsuit filed by a attorneyattorney specialized in environment, Robert Bilott. And the researchers were thus able to analyze the strategies of DuPont and 3M to protect their products.

They show, for example, that as early as 1961, a report presented “the ability of Teflon to increase the size of the liverliver rats at low doses » and advised that chemicals “be handled with extreme care, strictly avoiding contact with the skin”. In 1979, another report mentions dogsdogs “died two days later ingestioningestion » of C8, the other name of theacidacidperfluorooctanoic acid, a widely used PFAS. Two of the eight pregnant women who worked on the formulation of this substance at DuPont gave birth to children with malformations. This did not prevent the same DuPont, first in 1980, then in a press release dated 1991, from asserting that “the toxicity of C8 is of the order of that of table salt” and “C8 has no known toxic or harmful effects in humans at detected concentration levels”.

As public attention was drawn to the problem beginning in the late 1990s, DuPont urged the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to “say quickly” that “Consumer products sold under the Teflon brand are safe and there are no known human health effects”. In 2004, the EPA fined DuPont almost $16.5 million for not disclosing its findings. Nothing compared to the company’s annual income from the C8. On the order of a billion dollars!

“Many countries are pursuing legal and legislative actions to curb the production of these perennial pollutants and we hope they will be helped by the timeline of evidence presented in our study”say the researchers.