For some time I’ve been noticing news reports about PFAs [1]. I hadn’t thought much about that issue, I grew up when leaded petrol was standard, when almost all thermometers had mercury, when all small batteries had mercury, and I had generally considered that I had already had so many nasty chemicals in my body that as long as I don’t eat bottom feeding seafood often I didn’t have much to worry about. I already had a higher risk of a large number of medical issues than I’d like due to decisions made before I was born and there’s not much to do about it given that there are regulations restricting the emissions of lead, mercury etc.
I just watched a Veritasium video about Teflon and the PFA poisoning related to it’s production [2]. This made me realise that it’s more of a problem than I realised and it’s a problem that’s getting worse. PFA levels in the parts-per-trillion range in the environment can cause parts-per-billion in the body which increases the risks of several cancers and causes other health problems. Fortunately there is some work being done on water filtering, you can get filters for a home level now and they are working on filters that can work at a sufficient scale for a city water plant.
There is a map showing PFAs in the environment in Australia which shows some sites with concerning levels that are near residential areas [3]. One of the major causes for that in Australia is fire retardant foam – Australia has never had much if any Teflon manufacturing AFAIK.
Also they noted that donating blood regularly can decrease levels of PFAs in the bloodstream. So presumably people who have medical conditions that require receiving donated blood regularly will have really high levels.
Although I don’t encourage to pollute the environment or to expose yourself to potentially poisonous stuff arbitrarily, there are much more dangerous things to human health in this world, which should be addressed none the less, but people don’t.
E.g. loneliness The lethality of loneliness: John Cacioppo at TEDxDesMoines or early childhood trauma. I have a blog about the latter and wrote a book about it, but both is in German (translation is on its way), although many English sources like Bryan Post, Bruce D. Perry and Shelley Uram.
While you are correct, the issue here is that chemical pollution is insidious and difficult to remove once it’s happened. Also we can work on multiple problems at the same time.
Well, although removing loneliness is more difficult than to remove hunger or thirst, it is removable. Early childhood trauma is not, as our brain is a historical organ and there is only a small window of opportunity (age 1½ to 3) to learn emotional autoregulation.
On the contrary: it gets passed on from one generation to the next by the primary caregiver, mostly the mother, because being traumatized you’re not good at teaching emotional autoregulation to your child.
Yep, once a harzardous stuff is spread, you hardly get it back. But you might solve the problem by stopping further pollution, just like you could stop emission of GHGs oder CFCs by laws and regulations.
Stopping early childhood trauma is much more difficult – except by stopping biological reproduction – as you cannot choose your parents. It’s a multigenerational societywide problem on the individual/family level you cannot stop by law or regulation. Not to mention the lack of public awareness, which is much more focused on substance-based pollution and not the psychological one.
My one free link to my early childhood trauma blog