July 2022

US government health agencies need to move quickly to launch broad testing of people exposed to types of toxic chemicals known as PFAS to help evaluate and treat people who may suffer PFAS-related health problems, according to a report issued today.

The report recommends that the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention advise clinicians to offer PFAS blood testing to their patients who are likely to have a history of elevated exposure to the toxins. Those test results should be reported to state public health authorities to improve PFAS exposure surveillance, according to the report, issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, or NASEM. Read more…

Nine months after issuing a roadmap for curtailing PFAS contamination, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has missed significant deadlines. PFAS are a class of thousands of manufactured chemical compounds that can persist in human bodies and in the environment for decades.

Mounting research links PFAS chemicals to a wide range of health problems. Studies of the most widely used PFAS chemicals show links to cancer, as well as endocrine disruption.

The EPA must move faster and expand regulations to stop the approval of new PFAS chemicals.

Key commitments are missing from EPA’s PFAS roadmap, including:

1. Ending approval of new PFAS chemicals through the pre-manufacture notice (PMN) process and regulatory exemptions.
2. Adopting a moratorium on incineration, at least until EPA has determined if there are safe protocols for incineration and if so, until EPA has codified those protocols into binding regulations.
3. Regulating emissions of PFAS into air.
4. Regulating discharges of PFAS into water from all industrial sources.
5. Regulating PFAS as a class in all of EPA’s work.

Read more…