What does that mean? No studies have shown health issues related to PFAS yet and if they were a health concern, it would be known after 100 years. Yet cancer is not up, no environmental or lifestyle health issues are up except obesity, and that is due to an abundance of affordable food even for the world's poor.
PFAS are so ubiquitous they are detectable in the Ittoqqortoormiit villagers of East Greenland, which means if they are harmful people should be dropping left and right, yet the only casualties so far are mice who get 10,000 times the exposure humans will get in their lives.
PFAS did not kill these polar bears, the humans in Ittoqqortoormiit did. Yet the paper suggests trace levels of PFAS are worse for the bears than being dead. Photo: Rune Dietz
A saying in the areas of science not overrun by politics and agendas is that the presence of a pathogen does not mean pathology - the common phrase known to nearly all is that 'the dose makes the poison.' Water is hazardous to your health - if you drink enough of it. So is caffeine. So are pesticides detectable on that organic food rich people buy. If an activist scientist trying to get into the Washington Post writes a paper noting that a chemical in Scotch can kill, it will alarm people. If Science 2.0 notes that the dose they gave was 10,000 shots of Scotch - and that mice are not little people, those who read science will feel better.
Yet few people read science. We have had 300,000,000 readers in our history. About what environmental lawyers who pay for reach on social media got last month. It works because science has become an arm of politics, and in academic science the left dominates by over 9 to 1.
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The case study - so over in the EXPLORATORY pile rather than in the science one - says that 86 percent of residents in Ittoqqortoormiit they looked at have blood values that are higher than European Food Safety Authority lists as for "serious risk" of damage to the immune system.
Serious risk? Europeans did clinical trials where they damaged the immune systems of people in a control group? Of course not, the panel hand-picked studies they liked using mice and statistical correlation derived from food frequency questionnaires. In other words, they asked people what they ate, made an estimate on how much PFAS that meant, and linked that to a scientifically meaningless umbrella of 'immune system' changes.
How do you know if your immune system has changed over time? Did you get more colds one year? The flu? That is not due to your immune system as much as mutating viruses. There are so many confounders in that methodology that they had to pay to publish it in Lancet Planetary Health to try and make it seem like science.
It is good lawsuit fodder, though. The reason science loses so often is because there is no corporate conspiracy that anti-science activists insist must exist when they are raising money. Instead, corporate executives are far more ethical than their environmental counterparts. No one in ConAgra would lie about health claims in Dinty Moore Beef Stew yet Whole Foods proudly lies about its organic offerings. Chewing gum has numerous health and psychological benefits but companies who make it don't promote that, they are in the candy aisle and won't use PR outfits to claim they should be otherwise.
Funding for all science media in America is a few million dollars. Environmentalists raise $3 billion, mostly from corporations. They use that money to manufacture papers linking chemicals they want to sue over to health claims, usually by soliciting an author who is under their umbrella and well-connected at a journal - that's right, the conclusion is created before they start asking authors they know will create it. Then they get different writers to prepare papers citing the first one. Then they get allied journalists to write articles stating there is "emerging evidence" of harm based on the multiple papers they colluded to create.
It is a successful business model. It just isn't science. It is instead anti-science populism. You may think that the anti-vax movement was created in 2021, if you only read Mother Jones anyway, but if you only noticed it then that is because the anti-vax movement prior to that was dominated by the same groups promoting organic food, supplements, and claims about 'endocrine disruptors.' Like PFAS.
"If measures are not taken quickly, such as a ban on PFAS and the use of alternatives to PFAS, pollution of the environment will continue to threaten public health around the world," says the senior author, Professor Christian Sonne in the Department of Ecoscience of Aarhus University. Then he says pesticides are the problem and should be banned. When someone claiming to do science throws around the word 'ban', they are not involved in science, they want to shape policy. He just said PFAS were traveling in the atmosphere but then they are in pesticides? What about organic eggs? All of them have detectable PFAS.
And, what is up with that Ecoscience title? That's a bad brand in the science community. Using that name in the US is like if Cold Spring Harbor were continuing to hire people for its Eugenics Record Office. Ecoscience was the brainchild of the generation of eugenicists who came along after Hitler showed eugenics for what it really was. Margaret Sanger pivoted from her overt eugenics racism to Planned Parenthood, for example, while another eugenicist created Sierra Club to say genetically inferior people would ruin the planet. In the 1970s, Paul and Anne Ehrlich plus John Holdren made their case for what eugenics would hope to be in the late 20th century - government sterilization and population control. Ecoscience.
Efforts like solar panels and secret sauce in college admissions are clearly efforts to keep minorities down, and removing PFAS from tens of thousands of products would also make them more expensive. That is not good for anyone. Especially not natives in Greenland.
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