[Music] well welcome to another medcram lecture today we're going to talk about forever chemicals these are technologically advanced substances that are used in all sorts of things today like pans that don't stick things that don't break down foams in fire retardants clothes things that don't stain basically better living through chemicals things that make our life easier and there's something about these structures which we'll talk about that make them that way and unfortunately because of that they don't break down they don't break down on purpose and so whereas normal substances might break down in a number of months to years in the environment and break down into their normal parts these things stick around literally for thousands of years and unfortunately the science is telling us that these things can actually cause harm in living systems so we're going to talk about what these are where they came from why they are the way they are and what we can do about it now the term forever chemicals actually came about about four years ago by a professor at harvard that we actually had here on medcram dr joseph allen talking about ventilation you may recall but we also talked to him about these forever chemicals and there's literally hundreds and hundreds of them but we're going to talk about a few and as you'll see that's the problem is that there are a few that get used but there's really hundreds of them that can be used so what do we do let's take a deep dive and look at what is going on so as i mentioned there's a bunch of these but we're going to talk about primarily two of them today two types first one are called pfas or pfas and that stands for per and polyfluoroalkyl substances and another group is known as the bisphenols now you may recognize this biz phenols this is basically two and phenyl groups so if you know what that looks like it's a benzene ring with a hydroxyl group on it coupled together with something identical on the other side and there's something called bisphenol a that's known as bpa may have heard of that but there's also bpb there's bpaf there is bps in fact there's over 200 of these types of bisphenols basically with different groups attached on both sides they have very similar properties they're used a lot in plastics but can have issues in the human body in terms of hormone regulation on the other hand the pfas over here tend to use the carbon fluoride bond which is a very strong bond as the core of these substances and so you'll have something called p f o a which stands for perfluorooctanoic acid and another one is p f o s which stands for perflow octane sulfonic acid and yet another one is known as gen x no this is not the generation that was born from 1965 to 1980 but it's actually a substance lit stands for hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid and we won't write that down because that looks pretty complicated just know it as gen x this is gen x as you can see here there's a lot of these carbon fluoride bonds these things are very very stable take a long time for them to break down also these things have a tendency to basically allow air to pass through without allowing grease and other substances so they're great for coating things if you don't want things to stick so it's used a lot in non-stick pans it's also really hard to destroy so it's used a lot in fire protection it's also used in furniture clothing things of that nature and here's a structure of pfoa and pfos highly fluorinated carbons and you can see some other substances as well that are also highly fluorinated that's the issue is that you can make almost endless combinations of structures that have lots of fluorine atoms connected to carbons but the ones that are most commonly seen are the pfoa and pfos so what's the big news this week in june of 2022 after being really pushed and prodded by a organization called the environmental work group which is a non-profit pushing the epa to come up with better standards for monitoring these forever chemicals the epa finally says that they have found really no safe level for two toxic forever chemicals found in many u. s water systems and the reason why i say there that it's found in many u. s water systems is that it's really not being checked in a number of different systems and the two chemicals that we're talking about are pfoa and pfos and they've been linked to different types of cancer low birth weights thyroid disease and other health ailments and that's really the reason why we're talking about it here at medcram and what this article says is that the agency is now saying that any detectable amounts of pfoa and pfos are unsafe to consume so what is this environmental working group said they've been actually tracking these pfas chemicals in drinking water for some time because they're actually not officially regulated they've been very concerned about it and recently in the 2000s there was an agreement between industry and the environmental groups to basically stop using specifically pfoa and pfos now this has to be very clear they've stopped using those specific forever chemicals but as we've said there's hundreds of other chemicals that can work exactly the same way that is not pfoa and not pfos and so while they're not specifically using those chemicals you can still get harm from other chemicals in the same group so how widespread is this well scott faber who's the senior vice president of the environmental working group said that at least 1943 public water supplies across the country have been found to contain some amounts of these substances pfos and pfoa and they're likely many more that contain the chemicals but we don't know because they haven't been tested so the article goes on to state that if you actually test americans that more than 96 percent of americans have at least one of these groups of forever chemicals in their blood now of course we know about the dangers of pfoa and pfos the most because they've been studied the most but they're newer replacement chemicals that have taken their place ever since they've stopped using pfoa and pfos in manufacturing and the biggest one that has taken its place is something called gen x as we talked about and this has caused some issues in north carolina where there was apparently dumping of this chemical so what exactly is going on how are these substances actually interfering with our immune systems and this was a recent article that was published in the proceeds of the national academy of sciences that was written by carolyn beans who was a science writer and she referenced this study that was published in 2012 looking at serum vaccine antibody concentrations in children exposed to these specific compounds and what they found was that in children who had the higher concentrations of these substances there was a reduction in antibody responses after vaccination this again should raise some alarm bells in terms of the potential reason why we're seeing repeated infections with covet 19 and perhaps other infections in industrialized countries where there may be higher concentrations of these substances again this study only showed an association of course there wasn't a randomized controlled trial we would not do that with these types of substances interesting here in the results when they looked at the maternal concentration of these substances as an assumption for what was going on in the baby those that had two-fold greater concentrations of exposure were associated with a difference of negative 39 percent in the diphtheria antibody concentration when they actually checked the concentration in the child serum by the time they got to the age of five it showed a uniformly negative association with antibody levels especially at age seven years in another equation model a twofold greater concentration of major pfcs in child serum was associated with a difference of basically half of the overall antibody concentration a two-fold increase in these substances at the age of five years was associated with an odds ratio of 2.
38 to 4. 2 times the likelihood for falling below a clinically protective level of 0. 1 international units per milliliter for tetanus and diphtheria antibodies at age 7 years that means if you had a higher increase in these concentrations you're more likely to not get the immune response of these vaccines that you would normally need to have to prevent infection so the conclusion was is that elevated exposures to pfcs were associated with reduced humoral immune response to routine childhood immunizations in children aged five and seven years the article goes on to state that animal models and human studies have provided strong evidence that pfas alter the immune system diminishing the ability to fight disease or respond to a vaccine so it's good that we're not making these two substances that we talked about but it's not good that they're making new substances which may be as toxic or even more toxic than the two substances that we're not making anymore it says here that u.
s companies no longer manufacture the two best known pfas substances but these legacy substances persist in the environment even as thousands of others remain in production so what is it that we can do about it we know that industry was making these substances and these substances were getting into humans now ever since these substances have been banned in terms of their production we have started to see that the blood levels in humans of these substances specifically are actually going down but remember there are still concentrations of these substances in the environment and why would that be well again because these are forever substances it literally takes thousands of years for these things to break down but remember that just because industry can't make p f o a and p f o s it can make other chemicals like gen x or hundreds or thousands of other chemicals that do pretty much the same thing and there are multiple ways that these substances can actually get into human beings one of them is drinking water but it's not the only way and so there are solutions that we can employ to not only prevent these things here at the production level which would be ideal but also here at the consumption level really the best thing overall would be to attack it here at the production level because that would prevent these things from getting out into the community into the environment not only harming human beings but also harming animals however because this is the best way it hasn't stopped people from looking at other ways of doing it and preventing these chemicals from getting into the drinking water and making sure that the drinking water is safe from the standard of these chemicals so the question is is there are filters that can actually take out these substances remember again that the majority of these substances are going to be seen in large municipal drinking water districts that's because that's where these factories are generally located and so it's not going to be favorable to depend on filtering these things out of the drinking water only to provide clean water because it would place an undue economic burden on those that can least afford it nevertheless there have been some studies to see how well in-home drinking water filters can completely remove toxic pfas and i'll put a link to this article in the description below so you can read it for yourself here are the key takeaways reverse osmosis filters and two stage filters reduce pfas levels including gen x by 94 or more in water now there weren't a lot of two-stage filters that were tested so that requires a little bit further testing to see why they perform so well the carbon block filters remove 73 of contaminants of the pfas family but there was a lot of variation according to this study some performed very very well others not as well and the activated carbon filters that were whole house systems actually varied widely as well as you can see down here on the third point in fact in four of the six systems tested pfsa and pfca levels actually increased after filtration and the authors of this study said that the undersink reverse osmosis filter is the most efficient system for removing both the pfas contaminants prevalent in central north carolina and the pfea including gen x found in wilmington unfortunately they also cost much more than other point of use filters this raises concerns about environmental justice since pfas pollution affects more households that struggle financially than those that do not struggle and i'll actually include the american chemical society publication assessing the effectiveness of point of use residential drinking water filters for pfas's here in the description below so you can look for yourself exactly how they did the studies and what they showed and i was able to find a carbon block filter that actually shows that they are certified to remove p f o a and p f o s greater than 95. 5 percent of the time i have no financial interest in any of these companies and remember that drinking water is only one avenue that these forever chemicals can get into our system they're in our furniture they're in our clothes and they may be the reason why some of us may have immunodeficiencies the studies are associative we do not have the highest level of evidence yet to link those but it seems as though the more we learn about it the worse the news becomes and for those of you who are familiar with medcram we actually talked to professor joseph allen out of the harvard public school of health the man who actually coined the term forever chemicals about this very topic listen as kyle interviews dr alan about why bpa free products may not be all they're cracked up to be i want to ask you about some of the products that we all have in our homes or use every day and i have a water bottle here that says bpa free on it and when i read some of your book when you talk about how some of these chemicals are it's like chemical whack-a-mole i think was the term you used um so could you could you talk a little bit about that why something like bpa-free may not give the security that we hope it would yeah so we're moving to the topic of chemicals this is a massive topic that doesn't get enough attention it's something i've been studying for a long time and you'll really get me going because yeah there's a chapter in the middle of our book not trying to sell a book here but it talks about our global chemical experiment and i promise if you read it it should shock you it should absolutely shock you because there's an assumption that the products we buy are safe and that we don't that if there was a chemical that was toxic well of course it shouldn't be in your water bottle or my couch or my kid's child you know car seat um but here's how it works and here's the problem there over 80 000 chemicals in commerce very few have been tested for health and safety and so what happens is we don't follow the precautionary principle we allow companies to put these chemicals in commerce and then if we the scientists find out it's harmful they take it out but what happens is they often replace the toxic chemical with a chemical cousin that's just as toxic and we call this chemical whack-a-mole and it's this never-ending game that's been played for decades and bpa is a great example so if you're a customer you know you're well-meaning you know you look at your bottle okay there's two bottles one says bpa free well i must i'll get the bpa free one right bpa must be bad even if you know nothing about bpa and bpa stands for bisphenol a it's a hormone disrupting uh chemical that's used in some plastics the reality is though bpa got a bad rap and so manufacturers seized on this and they said well i'm going to sell bpa free everything they didn't just take out bpa they took out bpa but they replaced it with its chemical cousin bps for bisphenol s sure enough the toxicological profile looks exactly the same darn near similar to bpa so that way they played a game with you as a consumer bpa free is great that label might as well say contains bps bps is starting to get a bad rap you know what the replacement is bpf this goes on and on we've seen this with pesticides decades ago we see this chemical whack-a-mole in nail polish we see swapping of chemicals in e-cigarettes we see this in flame retardants in that are in your couch and my couch we see this with these forever chemicals these stain repellent chemicals that can cause testicular cancer that you find in non-stick pans that are used on carpets and there was one that was labeled bad okay that was removed and it was just subbed in for another one so this game of chemical whack-a-mole happens all the time and and we sometimes call it uh regrettable substitution is the less playful name for it but it's another name i don't like you know because it implies there's oh whoops we made a mistake it's a regrettable substitution whoops this has been happening for decades there's nothing regrettable about it it's a knowing uh failure of the system and a loophole in our chemical policy and here's where it's interesting for all of us and everybody these chemicals they migrate out of their products and if you take something like these forever chemicals um that are the ones that are in your non-stick pans and and in your carpets and when they're on our clothes it makes things you know water and soil just wash off these days it's amazing we love them as consumers well these things are really pernicious i mean they last in the environment forever i wrote an op-ed calling them forever chemicals and named them that two or three years ago at this point when that piece came out but they're associated with these harmful effects carcinogenic effects they're associated with they're called obesogens they interfere with lipid metabolism so we have all of these you know known adverse effects we keep using them and we have this chemical whack-a-mole and the problem with these forever chemicals is like at this point 6 000 variants so what do we even study next right so as a consumer we really have no chance to be like a thoughtful consumer and avoid these things because it's a totally uh it's a totally broken system any specific recommendations for people to help navigate this this landscape of uh of chemical whack-a-mole and and finding products that are safe to use yeah so you know i i think the first thing is is uh all getting informed about this right because i think few people know this is going on again i'm not trying to sell a book here but you could find you know look up forever chemicals look up this op-ed on chemical whack-a-mole if you're interested read that chapter and you'd be really surprised and then we can start asking for it i'll say from a from a systems standpoint we're trying to address this through my healthy buildings program at harvard with harvard's office for sustainability we created the harvard healthy materials academy and what we're doing is we're starting to change buying practices so instead of a company saying well here's something that doesn't have bpa we're starting to ask and say well what else is in it and by the way we don't want anything in that whole class of chemicals right we're not going to play this whack-a-mole game forever chemicals we don't want any of them i don't care what your next safe replacement is that you tell us is safe that we'll find out toxic and we're having a lot of success we have 40 pilot projects over 40 pilot projects on our campus where we're showing that you can design these spaces with great products that don't impact cost or time of your project they look great perform the same and you don't have the toxic chemicals in them so there's a way to do it we're trying to move that with the market we partnered with google two years ago on this uh initiative many other manufa our big companies are starting to put their buying power uh behind this movement to kind of rid the the market of these um you know these toxic chemicals that uh that are in everything there are deodorants and shampoos i don't use shampoo that's a bad example for me uh but in our couches chairs you know they're all around us um so the the way to do it is to move upstream and change the whole system join us at medcram.
