Rainwater everywhere on Earth unsafe to drink due to ‘forever chemicals’
I find it disconcerting that this has apparently been known since the 1970s. Seems like the Big Tobacco playbook all over again (only with even worse effects).<p>From the book “Exposure” by Robert Bilott, the real-life lawyer portrayed in the “Dark Water” movie:<p>&gt; The internal alarm bells had first been sounded at 3M and DuPont after the publication of a scientific paper by the American Chemical Society in 1976. The paper had a curious impetus: Donald Taves, a University of Rochester toxicologist, had discovered two different kinds of fluoride in his own blood. Finding inorganic fluoride was not surprising—it is routinely put into the public water supply as an aid in preventing cavities. But the other form, organic fluoride, is man-made in industrial labs. What was it doing in his blood?
Dr. Taves wanted to find out. So he teamed up with W. S. Guy, a faculty member of the College of Dentistry at the University of Florida. They gathered plasma from blood banks in five cities and tested them for the presence of both kinds of fluoride. They also obtained records of how much fluoride was put into the water of those cities. As expected, the levels of “regular” (inorganic) fluoride in blood correlated with the levels of fluoride in the public water. But the levels of synthetic fluoride (organic) did not. Where was it coming from?
Guy and Taves noticed that the compounds found in the blood had a chemical structure consistent with compounds “widely used commercially for their potent surfactant properties.” In their publication of those findings, they hypothesized that the source was industrial fluorochemicals manufactured by 3M.