I would enjoy seeing the studies that show they are harmful in the doses that humans are exposed to as well, I don't know much of anything about this subject.
> What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies — two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late ’70s, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about 10 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low — roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet.
the only propaganda about PFOS was made by 3M, telling us these chemicals were safe, when they knew they weren't.
Like countless substances both natural and synthetic, they appear safe enough if you don't eat a substantial amount of them. How do the quantities involved in the studies compare to the levels we end up consuming? Nobody ever seems to address that.
since these chemicals accumulate in the body, if we're absorbing them from the environment they could reach toxic levels. but what if we don't measure toxicity just by death, but by worsening health? if i or my child has some mysterious ailment, how do we know it's not from PFOS chemicals, or many of the other synthetic chemicals industries have been pumping into our air, water, and earth for decades?
Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities.
Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto. Sometimes that kind of throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified, as in the leaded-gasoline example, while sometimes it's not.
this is some real bad faith arguing saying my point is semantically identical to the unabomber manifesto. i really don't think it's close to that, since i'm not arguing for any kind of primitivism, nor for killing people to get there. and if you agree that this throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified sometime, maybe this is actually one of those cases?
the point of the article, and what i think you're ignoring, is the decades of cover-up by the corporate producers of these chemicals to protect their profits. that's not a good look if they're convinced their products are worth the damage
> Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities.
We mostly don't take things in the large-enough quantities to make them poisonous. We cook on teflon for entire lifetimes, scraping food off of it, throwing out the pans when we visibly see the coating coming off.
> Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto.
No, they don't. But suggestions of regulation or political change somehow always get compared to terrorism.
In exactly what way does it sound like that? Did coffee companies find out that about a asprin's weight of coffee grounds would kill a monkey, and suppress that information?
Or is it because just because that you think it's not important that a study found that some aspect of coffee could cause cancer in rats, and you also don't care about studies about PFOAs, so they're the same?
