Edit: This also helps others who are in accidents, car wrecks, have Cancer, etc. Yes, we pass on the PFAS to others, but the immediate need for blood is more urgent than the potential long term impacts of PFAS.
I used to donate blood regularly but now that I'm in Japan they require me to be decently fluent in Japanese to "understand" the risks, despite having done it a bunch of times in other countries (and other medical procedures not requiring Japanese knowledge).
With travel, I understand that there is a higher risk of lots of diseases, and testing against all possible infectious diseases is not feasible. Drug use is also obviously disqualifying. But why would you care about someone's sexual behavior? The blood must be tested for common drugs and common blood borne diseases regardless, and it's perfectly possible to engage in sexually risky behaviors and not have any venereal disease (unlike with drug use, where it implicitly means you will have levels of those drugs in your blood), just like it's possible to be very careful with your sexual behavior and still get a disease.
Note: for tattoos, I have no idea if the problem is also related to venereal diseases, or if there is any problem from contamination with the tattoo ink itself, and I don't care enough about this subject to look it up.
Unfortunately tests are not 100% accurate and there's a window between when the pathogen is present and when it's detectible. Add in that many viruses aren't directly detectable, the tests look for antibodies to the virus.
This is why they usually ask if you've had a new sexual partner in the past 3 or 4 months. This is the window period for detecting some STDs and other diseases.
> But why would you care about someone's sexual behavior? The blood must be tested for common drugs and common blood borne diseases regardless, and it's perfectly possible to engage in sexually risky behaviors and not have any venereal disease
Men who have sex with men are something like 50-100x more likely than the general population to acquire HIV. HIV tests do not have a 0% false positive. They will not catch all very recent infections. The rationale for excluding them until recently is that it’s defense in depth and it doesn’t hurt the blood supply much because they only make up about 2-3% of the population.
The current rule is that MSM don’t face a blanket ban, but if you’ve had anal sex in the last 3 months you have to wait because anal sex is inherently more likely to transmit HIV and the tests may not catch a very new infection. Other diseases like Hepatitis have a similar issue.
The answer to all of that is mainly hepatitis C, that can have a window detection of 6 months, even more.
And yes, you can be very careful and get a disease. But they are playing statistics here: over 60% of injected drug users have Hep-C, that means a lot of prostitutes. They won't and shouldn't trust anyone who say "hey, I had unsafe sex against all advice, but was very careful with the tattoo in a dark cellar and the heroin party, pinky promise".
For tattoos, if the artist isn't using a brand new set of needles for you, you risk bloodborne disease transmission, with hepatitis B being a particular danger.
All of these things can mostly be tested. When I donated regularly in the UK after being in the southern US, they screen me for west nile virus but still take my blood and use it.
Granted it’s shorter, but there are longer wait periods depending on the country. It’s defense in depth because false negatives happen and some viruses take time to show up on tests.
We do test the blood, but they also do coarse grained screenings like this to avoid some level of waste on intake. It's like having client and server side validation.
Tests cost money. They have blood enough to allow them to discriminate. If they were lacking, they will be less picky: in a catastrophic event they call for blood donors and they rely on tests, risking a detection window.
But under normal conditions, letting only the best candidates donate is the most efficient way.
I'm not sure there are any regulations around opting to do that in the US. Do you have a phlebotomist friend? If so, they might do it for you, but it can be risky and they might not want to take the risk, get sued, etc.
It is an interesting question. Are there companies that draw and discard?
I'd assume donated blood matches the average level that people already have in them, so not sure it really matters. But if you donated regularly enough, you could be donating blood that has lower than average levels!
The EPA first issued health advisories around PFASs in 2009. Why didn’t these folks file this petition sometime during the 12 years since then where it likely would’ve gotten a more favorable reception?
Lets agree that these folks are wrong and ideally they should have petitioned 12 years ago. The question to ask is - for an admin which loudly claims to make America healthy again and talk about making everything chemical free etc - why can't they pass this? Is it because they can't score brownie points with base or they are overtly corrupt and do the same thing they accuse others of doing? Or that they know their supporters will not look at the validity of the claim and instead discredit people by asking whataboutism and party line questions?
2009 is a generation ago. Asking why a new generation why they might not have petitioned 17 years ago seems like asking where a 21 year old was on 9/11.
As for a better reception, the assumption was RFK Jr. would take it more seriously.
> Why didn’t these folks file this petition sometime during the 12 years since then where it likely would’ve gotten a more favorable reception?
Because then The Uniparty would look bad.
Instead, we can prop up the illusion of democracy and point fingers at "the other side" of good cop / bad cop while elites poison everybody more. We wouldn't want people living too far beyond their working years, after all.
Ya, everything is a conspiracy. It couldn't be that the FDA has been working on PFAS related issues for 6 years now and this petition was more to speed things along in a way that would force progress.
It's not a "conspiracy." The way our government is currently structured, we have a permanent bureaucracy that mostly runs things. And there is a robust revolving door between them and the industry. While they'll take dramatic actions on things that are hot button political issues, like climate change, they are extremely resistant to rocking the boat on almost anything else.
Environmental pollutants like PFAS fly under the political radar, and there's very little incentive at places like FDA to regulate the problem boldly.
Another issue is that sewage sludge and "biosolids", unknowingly containing PFAS, is/was being used as farm fertilizer, causing some farms to have to be written off for food production. I would expect many more farms in the future to be found with PFAS soil levels exceeding what is safe to produce food with. The only way to find out is to test.
> The practice of spreading sludge as a soil amendment has been a common practice in Maine and across the nation for decades. Land application of sludge material occurred long before there was knowledge that it may contain PFAS or the health implications of PFAS.
I have no issue repurposing biological waste as fertilizer, that’s fine. But sewage is not just biological waste. It’s got all sorts of other shit in it that’s not suitable for reentry into the food chain. This isn’t a practice that should be allowed anywhere. It’s not like they can’t grow crops without it, they’re just gaming costs.
That's the challenge. The human waste stream is not just biological waste. It is PFAS, it is residual pharma and hormones the human body passes, it is recreational drugs, etc. It is not fit for reuse imho (as a layman, of course, but I believe the evidence strongly supports this assertion), it should be processed with plasma gasification to be made inert and the slag used in road/tarmac applications or landfilled. Why do we do not do that? Well, that costs money, money we are unwilling to spend (versus dumping a hazmat product onto ag land, because it is cheaper).
We learned this with BSE (why you don't feed cows to cows, prion contamination), we learned this with PFAS, we learn this a lot (ag supply chain weaknesses due to prioritizing cost over safety). We just don't seem to care enough to change the system. Caveat emptor.
I can't believe that we are still using sewage sludge as fertilizer. People dump anything down the drain. I remember this being an issue 30-40 years ago with PCBs.
From industrial sources, in some cases, no less. Paper mills, tanneries, etc. Silver lining is that these farms are solar PV installations of the future, when possible, to give the land a few decades to recover from contamination. I presume you can pair this solar in an agrivoltaics model with grasses or other flora they can absorb and remediate subject contamination, but do not know enough to speak with authority on that.
> Maine farmland made worthless by PFAS chemicals could be put back into production again through harvesting the power of the sun.
> Last month, regulators approved new rules following 2023 state legislation that calls for renewable energy generated on contaminated land, clearing the way for the development of thousands of megawatts of new clean power.
(brownfields are a great place to cite solar generation)
How much of this is real and how much of this is people stretching facts to get their farmland construed as polluted to make the solar because over the years people like you have construed the laws and rules to punish greenfield development and agricultural redevelopment?
Is your argument farmers are lying about their farmland contamination to develop solar instead of selling this land for development or development? Please provide evidence and citations this is the case, versus documented contamination of hundreds of farms (in the case of farms in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama and Florida). "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It seems very unlikely this is fraud, versus legitimate measurements of substances causing harm and requiring the land to be taken out of agriculture use.
> Meanwhile, sewage sludge is behind a widening PFAS crisis that has contaminated farms in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama and Florida. PFAS, or “forever chemicals”, are linked to a range of serious health problems like cancer, thyroid disorders, immune disorders and low birth weight. The chemicals are a product used to make non-stick or water-resistant products, and are found in everything from raincoats to dental floss to food packaging.
> Maine’s testing of 44 fields sprayed with biosolids earlier this year consistently found alarming PFAS levels in the ground, cows and farmers’ blood, which forced one dairy farm to shut down.
> “They’re finding kilograms of PFAS in sewage sludge when nanograms are harmful to humans, so you can’t regulate it as a fertilizer,” said Laura Orlando, a civil engineer who tracks problems with biosolids.
> A University of North Carolina study found 75% of people living near farms that spread biosolids experienced health issues like burning eyes, nausea, vomiting, boils and rashes, while others have contracted MRSA, a penicillin-resistant “superbug”.
> In South Carolina, sludge containing high levels of carcinogenic PCBs was spread on cropland, and in Georgia sludge killed cows. Biosolids are also thought to be partly responsible for toxic algae blooms in the Great Lakes and Florida, and biosolid treatment centers regularly pollute the air around them.
EPA (and worse, state) rules cooked up by people like you (plural) penalize greenfield development on purpose. Without high enough land values you can't redevelop agriculture into much else. Green energy gets exemptions so that's what gets pursued.
So if every single farm has PFAS you're only ever gonna hear about it on the ones where the regulators are jerks and they need to be a brownfield to get favorable enough regulatory treatment to make the project actually happen.
They're not lying. They're selectively mentioning it. Plenty of these farms did and probably could continue to perhaps go on to produce plenty of perfectly fine crops despite current or past contamination. They were never contaminated enough to "matter". Just contaminated enough to get better treatment by bringing it up.
Also it doesn't take a genius to figure out that spewing laundered shit onto fields is probably bad or at least risky for the same reasons you shouldn't eat a ton of tuna that was fished out of SF bay.
Short of frequent blood donation, is there any reasonably adoptable life change a person can make to meaningfully reduce expected PFAS intake, or is it best to try not to think about it?
Yes, there are a few things you can do. In rough priority / proven benefit order:
1. Eliminate as many items as possible from your diet that make use of PFAS based components, such as plastic linings. This means don't buy groceries packaged in lined packaging, this means don't cook with Teflon pans, and it means don't drink water from plastic bottles or bottles lines with plastic.
2. Get a whole-home water filtration system that is certified (NSF 53 or similar standard) to reduce/remove PFAS and if possible, on top of this do under-sink RO for drinking/cooking which is certified (NSF 58 or similar) to remove PFAS and use glass or stainless steel reusable water bottles to take water outside your home.
3. Exercise regularly so that you sweat and drink lots of appropriately filtered water, donate blood and/or plasma regularly.
Everything else is basically guesswork, these are the only things known to have any benefit. We mostly ingest PFAS due to contamination in the food and water supply. This contamination is unavoidable, but we can greatly reduce exposure by making smarter choices about packaging materials and cooking methods, and a big one is simply not drinking anything that you can't confirm has been properly filtered and packaged.
I'm a bit extreme, I even brew and bottle my own beer and other beverages like soda and water kefir/kombucha to avoid exposure to externally packaged products that may be contaminated with PFAS.
It was always a farce that only incredibly stupid people fell for. I mean, even their most "well meaning" gestures were promoting saturated fat, unpasteurized milk and tallow. Those already are just spectacularly ignorant, destructive recommendations going against every bit of science.
Now add that they've basically abolished the EPA (want to power your new data center with a phalanx of smog spewing generators running on bunker oil? Eh, go nuts!) and legalized some highly cancerous pesticides to be used on food crops.
Trump a few days ago pardoned some people who he claims were "fixing their cars": They were actually running a commercial operation removing emissions systems on diesel heavy equipment (a so-called "delete"), and the impact of "rolling coal" is overwhelming and hugely negative, making a single vehicle pollute more than hundreds. But hey, what's the harm in particulate and NOx, besides lung damage, worker health and reduced lifespans?
This vile, corrupt administration hates Americans and wants to see you all die. There is no other possible interpretation. It is simply astonishing that there is some subset of profoundly gullible and/or unintelligent clowns who still support this busted kleptocracy. What a disgrace.
Obviously you're right, but none of this stuff matters to the dudes who worship him. As long as he keeps making the people they hate angry they'll support him, even at their own expense
RFK Jr. has clearly been a dangerously misinformed clown for years, loosely holding a plethora of opinions straight from the dumbest parts of YouTube/Twitter. I cannot fathom the thought process of someone who would think "oh he is a nutritional nightmare, sounds like the high-school dropout uncle who gets all of his information from chiropractors on YouTube, but he does a couple of pushups so maybe he'll be alright".
Worse still, he was clearly a foolish pawn for Chairman Trump and his administration full of dismantle everything industrialists.
Not surprising at all. What are "action levels" supposed to do? It's basically a helpful suggestion to take action, but you don't have to. FDA obviously doesn't care about the well-being of anyone.
The article fails to mention risk and the amounts that create those. In typical journalist fashion it just emphasizes the word “chemical” and other scary framings.
True. The risk is heavily downplayed, since the health effects manifest in decades and can be blamed on lifestyle factors, while the amounts causing health issues are in the order of parts per trillion.
No Tylenol for y'all, but I'll shout the whole bar another round of PFAS!
> They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they can persist for thousands of years in the environment, and are designed to be indestructible.
But _not_ autism! Autism is the great evil we have chosen as our individual health enemy. I don't see autism listed, you may pass.
I think you mean PFOS and not PFAS, the relationship of cancers and health risks is linked to PFOS, but not PFAS in general at this time.
PFOS in consumer-facing products were also majority phased out back in 2015.
Yes. But of course "healthier" is describing the health of brain worms. On the bright side, this probably indicates that the reactionaries' pushes to lower the intelligence of the population are reaching a point of diminishing returns, as they've now had to turn to parasites to continue the trend.
Whenever I see something like this, I'm always curious how the libertarians rationalize their world view. Because this is what they want: no regulations where companies can do whatever they want. And they will.
We're witnessing the looting of America. Every level of government seems increasingly dedicated to transferring wealth from the taxpayer to the wealthy. But even that's not sufficient. Apparently the wealthy also need to poison the land and people too for an uptick in profits. Why should they care? Capital is mobile. They'll simply leave whenever society collapses.
As a not libertarian, it's pretty simple. Look at Patagonia[1] for how the free market addresses this issue. If people care, markets will cater to them.
>The agency said it plans to set less non-binding “action levels” that do not require contaminated food to be removed from shelves. “Tolerance levels”, or limits, make it illegal to sell food contaminated beyond a set threshold.
From the FDA
>Action levels and tolerances represent limits at or above which FDA will take legal action to remove products from the market.
Typical junk tier rage bait journalism you can expect from the guardian.
Your comment does not give a correct impression of FDA's position here.
Action levels are correctly described by the article and not by whatever FDA quote you provided, which seems to imply the FDA is required to take action to remove products. Surpassing action levels do not require FDA to remove products from the market.
Doing whole blood donations seems to significantly reduce PFAS in the blood. Here's one paper:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Edit: This also helps others who are in accidents, car wrecks, have Cancer, etc. Yes, we pass on the PFAS to others, but the immediate need for blood is more urgent than the potential long term impacts of PFAS.
I used to donate blood regularly but now that I'm in Japan they require me to be decently fluent in Japanese to "understand" the risks, despite having done it a bunch of times in other countries (and other medical procedures not requiring Japanese knowledge).
My girlfriend accidentally told the donation center she went to Mexico, and they banned her from donating for four years.
Apparently you'd only go to Mexico to eat brain tacos and share needles with cows. Surely there's a better way to filter out risky blood.
Yes... travel, tattoos, drug use and sexual behavior can and should disqualify a person from donating blood.
With travel, I understand that there is a higher risk of lots of diseases, and testing against all possible infectious diseases is not feasible. Drug use is also obviously disqualifying. But why would you care about someone's sexual behavior? The blood must be tested for common drugs and common blood borne diseases regardless, and it's perfectly possible to engage in sexually risky behaviors and not have any venereal disease (unlike with drug use, where it implicitly means you will have levels of those drugs in your blood), just like it's possible to be very careful with your sexual behavior and still get a disease.
Note: for tattoos, I have no idea if the problem is also related to venereal diseases, or if there is any problem from contamination with the tattoo ink itself, and I don't care enough about this subject to look it up.
Unfortunately tests are not 100% accurate and there's a window between when the pathogen is present and when it's detectible. Add in that many viruses aren't directly detectable, the tests look for antibodies to the virus.
This is why they usually ask if you've had a new sexual partner in the past 3 or 4 months. This is the window period for detecting some STDs and other diseases.
> But why would you care about someone's sexual behavior? The blood must be tested for common drugs and common blood borne diseases regardless, and it's perfectly possible to engage in sexually risky behaviors and not have any venereal disease
Men who have sex with men are something like 50-100x more likely than the general population to acquire HIV. HIV tests do not have a 0% false positive. They will not catch all very recent infections. The rationale for excluding them until recently is that it’s defense in depth and it doesn’t hurt the blood supply much because they only make up about 2-3% of the population.
The current rule is that MSM don’t face a blanket ban, but if you’ve had anal sex in the last 3 months you have to wait because anal sex is inherently more likely to transmit HIV and the tests may not catch a very new infection. Other diseases like Hepatitis have a similar issue.
The answer to all of that is mainly hepatitis C, that can have a window detection of 6 months, even more.
And yes, you can be very careful and get a disease. But they are playing statistics here: over 60% of injected drug users have Hep-C, that means a lot of prostitutes. They won't and shouldn't trust anyone who say "hey, I had unsafe sex against all advice, but was very careful with the tattoo in a dark cellar and the heroin party, pinky promise".
For tattoos, if the artist isn't using a brand new set of needles for you, you risk bloodborne disease transmission, with hepatitis B being a particular danger.
All of these things can mostly be tested. When I donated regularly in the UK after being in the southern US, they screen me for west nile virus but still take my blood and use it.
The UK also has a wait time for many countries including Mexico.
https://my.blood.co.uk/eligibility/travel/article?id=47&titl...
Granted it’s shorter, but there are longer wait periods depending on the country. It’s defense in depth because false negatives happen and some viruses take time to show up on tests.
Blood is tested for disease, but the false negative rate for each test is its own risk.
If you got blood from an addict living on the street engaging in prostitution and tested it, would you trust that blood?
I wouldn't.
I don't get the sense we have any standards for actually vetting the blood that's donated, which is deeply concerning
We do, they are just not cheap enough to do on individual donations so you have to throw away a big batch every time they catch something.
We do test the blood, but they also do coarse grained screenings like this to avoid some level of waste on intake.
We do test the blood, but they also do coarse grained screenings like this to avoid some level of waste on intake. It's like having client and server side validation.
Well, it's the having of an infectious blood borne thing that disqualifies you.
m-m sex is still disqualifying even if all parties are completely clean and safe. it's discriminatory.
All anal sex in the US requires a 3 month waiting period (as does any kind of sex with a new partner) not just male to male.
Anal sex is inherently much more likely to transit HIV and HIV tests have a higher false negative rate for new infections.
People have more unprotected, regrettable sex during travel and vacations, so maybe they're on to something?
Sounds like something you should test rather that just rely on heuristics
Tests cost money. They have blood enough to allow them to discriminate. If they were lacking, they will be less picky: in a catastrophic event they call for blood donors and they rely on tests, risking a detection window.
But under normal conditions, letting only the best candidates donate is the most efficient way.
Heuristics work, why would you not rely on heuristics?
Sounds like something you should evaluate with a cost/benefit analysis, including the false negative and false positive rates.
I was banned roughly the same time for being in the US. I guess its mostly so they don't need to check for unexpected things.
I get it, just seems like it could be more granular, especially since she could have just said no.
> eat brain tacos
What's wrong with that? Animal brains are a common dish in many countries, including France, Asia, and parts of the United States
Vector for prion disease.
Sounds like a wild party.
Bloodletting making a comeback? And having actual benefits this time?
There's kinda a significant difference between bloodletting and blood donation.
For starters, you're not supposed to donate blood when you're sick.
The other being the quantity. A donation is 1-2 pints. Wikipedia lists bloodletting as easily 3 pints [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting#Use_in_the_1600s_...
me to the plague doctors: we are SO back
I wonder what it would cost in the US to have a pint of blood taken - I can't donate. Guess I could do it myself...
I'm not sure there are any regulations around opting to do that in the US. Do you have a phlebotomist friend? If so, they might do it for you, but it can be risky and they might not want to take the risk, get sued, etc.
It is an interesting question. Are there companies that draw and discard?
> we pass the PFAS to others
Is there no way to filter them out of withdrawn blood?
That's correct.
Aren’t we just donating the PFAS to potentially sicker patients?
I'd assume donated blood matches the average level that people already have in them, so not sure it really matters. But if you donated regularly enough, you could be donating blood that has lower than average levels!
Do blook banks have a way of filtering out PFAS? Or are we giving each other forever chemicals through blood donations?
A life saving blood transfusion or avoid forever chemicals likely already in my body, hmmm what to choose...
But does it have to be one or the other? Or is there some possibility of somehow removing the PFAS from donated blood?
Not without filtering other things we need.
Reason #136 for why tech-bros need a blood boy to infuse from daily.
The EPA first issued health advisories around PFASs in 2009. Why didn’t these folks file this petition sometime during the 12 years since then where it likely would’ve gotten a more favorable reception?
Because the EPA called it the "2010/2015 PFOA Stewardship Program" not the "2010/2015 PFAS Stewardship Program" PFAS != PFOA
I feel like most people hadn’t heard about them until a couple of years ago.
The timeline is wild. It took Patagonia like a decade to actually make PFAS free stuff.
whataboutism is a tiresome argument.
Lets agree that these folks are wrong and ideally they should have petitioned 12 years ago. The question to ask is - for an admin which loudly claims to make America healthy again and talk about making everything chemical free etc - why can't they pass this? Is it because they can't score brownie points with base or they are overtly corrupt and do the same thing they accuse others of doing? Or that they know their supporters will not look at the validity of the claim and instead discredit people by asking whataboutism and party line questions?
Because the majority of Americans are too stupid and too lazy; they won't bother until the threat is literally killing them.
2009 is a generation ago. Asking why a new generation why they might not have petitioned 17 years ago seems like asking where a 21 year old was on 9/11.
As for a better reception, the assumption was RFK Jr. would take it more seriously.
> Why didn’t these folks file this petition sometime during the 12 years since then where it likely would’ve gotten a more favorable reception?
Because then The Uniparty would look bad.
Instead, we can prop up the illusion of democracy and point fingers at "the other side" of good cop / bad cop while elites poison everybody more. We wouldn't want people living too far beyond their working years, after all.
Ya, everything is a conspiracy. It couldn't be that the FDA has been working on PFAS related issues for 6 years now and this petition was more to speed things along in a way that would force progress.
But no, everything is a big conspiracy.
It's not a "conspiracy." The way our government is currently structured, we have a permanent bureaucracy that mostly runs things. And there is a robust revolving door between them and the industry. While they'll take dramatic actions on things that are hot button political issues, like climate change, they are extremely resistant to rocking the boat on almost anything else.
Environmental pollutants like PFAS fly under the political radar, and there's very little incentive at places like FDA to regulate the problem boldly.
> Ya, everything is a conspiracy.
No conspiracy required. It's just corporations acting like one would expect. In fact, it'd be very strange if they didn't.
It's fundamentally a design problem (or for elites, a solution).
EPA already set a Maximum Contaminant Level of 4.0 ppt. That's why they moved most PFAS production to China.
In drinking water, yes. And the EPA coordinated a "voluntary" phase-out of PFAS in packaging, but it is not enforced.
Is there a limit in food, which is what this petition was about?
Another issue is that sewage sludge and "biosolids", unknowingly containing PFAS, is/was being used as farm fertilizer, causing some farms to have to be written off for food production. I would expect many more farms in the future to be found with PFAS soil levels exceeding what is safe to produce food with. The only way to find out is to test.
Maine listened to farmers and confronted the PFAS crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509448 - February 2026 (0 comments)
Maine Is a Warning for America's PFAS Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40007582 - April 2024 (0 comments)
Toxic Chemical Contaminant PFAS Found on Maine Farms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20142212 - June 2019 (1 comment)
> The practice of spreading sludge as a soil amendment has been a common practice in Maine and across the nation for decades. Land application of sludge material occurred long before there was knowledge that it may contain PFAS or the health implications of PFAS.
EPA Fact Sheet: Draft Sewage Sludge Risk Assessment for PFOA and PFOS: Information for Farmers - https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2025-01/fact-shee... - January 2025
EPA Basic Information about Biosolids: https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/biosolids/basic-inform...
I have no issue repurposing biological waste as fertilizer, that’s fine. But sewage is not just biological waste. It’s got all sorts of other shit in it that’s not suitable for reentry into the food chain. This isn’t a practice that should be allowed anywhere. It’s not like they can’t grow crops without it, they’re just gaming costs.
That's the challenge. The human waste stream is not just biological waste. It is PFAS, it is residual pharma and hormones the human body passes, it is recreational drugs, etc. It is not fit for reuse imho (as a layman, of course, but I believe the evidence strongly supports this assertion), it should be processed with plasma gasification to be made inert and the slag used in road/tarmac applications or landfilled. Why do we do not do that? Well, that costs money, money we are unwilling to spend (versus dumping a hazmat product onto ag land, because it is cheaper).
We learned this with BSE (why you don't feed cows to cows, prion contamination), we learned this with PFAS, we learn this a lot (ag supply chain weaknesses due to prioritizing cost over safety). We just don't seem to care enough to change the system. Caveat emptor.
InEnTec says its plasma technology effectively destroys PFAS - https://www.wastetodaymagazine.com/news/inentec-says-its-pla... - August 23rd, 2024
Biosolids: mix human waste with toxic chemicals, then spread on crops - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/05/biosolid... - October 5th, 2019
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
I can't believe that we are still using sewage sludge as fertilizer. People dump anything down the drain. I remember this being an issue 30-40 years ago with PCBs.
From industrial sources, in some cases, no less. Paper mills, tanneries, etc. Silver lining is that these farms are solar PV installations of the future, when possible, to give the land a few decades to recover from contamination. I presume you can pair this solar in an agrivoltaics model with grasses or other flora they can absorb and remediate subject contamination, but do not know enough to speak with authority on that.
Maine farmers impacted by PFAS pivot to harvesting solar power - https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/tech/science/environ... - August 22nd, 2024
> Maine farmland made worthless by PFAS chemicals could be put back into production again through harvesting the power of the sun.
> Last month, regulators approved new rules following 2023 state legislation that calls for renewable energy generated on contaminated land, clearing the way for the development of thousands of megawatts of new clean power.
(brownfields are a great place to cite solar generation)
EPA Brownfields Renewable Energy Siting - https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-08/brownfiel...
NREL Solar Development on Contaminated and Disturbed Lands - https://web.archive.org/web/20250218192949/https://www.nrel....
Plant-based material can remediate PFAS, new research suggests - https://www.niehs.nih.gov/news/factor/2022/9/science-highlig...
How much of this is real and how much of this is people stretching facts to get their farmland construed as polluted to make the solar because over the years people like you have construed the laws and rules to punish greenfield development and agricultural redevelopment?
Is your argument farmers are lying about their farmland contamination to develop solar instead of selling this land for development or development? Please provide evidence and citations this is the case, versus documented contamination of hundreds of farms (in the case of farms in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama and Florida). "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It seems very unlikely this is fraud, versus legitimate measurements of substances causing harm and requiring the land to be taken out of agriculture use.
From Biosolids: mix human waste with toxic chemicals, then spread on crops - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/05/biosolid... - October 5th, 2019
> Meanwhile, sewage sludge is behind a widening PFAS crisis that has contaminated farms in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama and Florida. PFAS, or “forever chemicals”, are linked to a range of serious health problems like cancer, thyroid disorders, immune disorders and low birth weight. The chemicals are a product used to make non-stick or water-resistant products, and are found in everything from raincoats to dental floss to food packaging.
> Maine’s testing of 44 fields sprayed with biosolids earlier this year consistently found alarming PFAS levels in the ground, cows and farmers’ blood, which forced one dairy farm to shut down.
> “They’re finding kilograms of PFAS in sewage sludge when nanograms are harmful to humans, so you can’t regulate it as a fertilizer,” said Laura Orlando, a civil engineer who tracks problems with biosolids.
> A University of North Carolina study found 75% of people living near farms that spread biosolids experienced health issues like burning eyes, nausea, vomiting, boils and rashes, while others have contracted MRSA, a penicillin-resistant “superbug”.
> In South Carolina, sludge containing high levels of carcinogenic PCBs was spread on cropland, and in Georgia sludge killed cows. Biosolids are also thought to be partly responsible for toxic algae blooms in the Great Lakes and Florida, and biosolid treatment centers regularly pollute the air around them.
EPA (and worse, state) rules cooked up by people like you (plural) penalize greenfield development on purpose. Without high enough land values you can't redevelop agriculture into much else. Green energy gets exemptions so that's what gets pursued.
So if every single farm has PFAS you're only ever gonna hear about it on the ones where the regulators are jerks and they need to be a brownfield to get favorable enough regulatory treatment to make the project actually happen.
They're not lying. They're selectively mentioning it. Plenty of these farms did and probably could continue to perhaps go on to produce plenty of perfectly fine crops despite current or past contamination. They were never contaminated enough to "matter". Just contaminated enough to get better treatment by bringing it up.
Also it doesn't take a genius to figure out that spewing laundered shit onto fields is probably bad or at least risky for the same reasons you shouldn't eat a ton of tuna that was fished out of SF bay.
Short of frequent blood donation, is there any reasonably adoptable life change a person can make to meaningfully reduce expected PFAS intake, or is it best to try not to think about it?
Yes, there are a few things you can do. In rough priority / proven benefit order:
1. Eliminate as many items as possible from your diet that make use of PFAS based components, such as plastic linings. This means don't buy groceries packaged in lined packaging, this means don't cook with Teflon pans, and it means don't drink water from plastic bottles or bottles lines with plastic.
2. Get a whole-home water filtration system that is certified (NSF 53 or similar standard) to reduce/remove PFAS and if possible, on top of this do under-sink RO for drinking/cooking which is certified (NSF 58 or similar) to remove PFAS and use glass or stainless steel reusable water bottles to take water outside your home.
3. Exercise regularly so that you sweat and drink lots of appropriately filtered water, donate blood and/or plasma regularly.
Everything else is basically guesswork, these are the only things known to have any benefit. We mostly ingest PFAS due to contamination in the food and water supply. This contamination is unavoidable, but we can greatly reduce exposure by making smarter choices about packaging materials and cooking methods, and a big one is simply not drinking anything that you can't confirm has been properly filtered and packaged.
I'm a bit extreme, I even brew and bottle my own beer and other beverages like soda and water kefir/kombucha to avoid exposure to externally packaged products that may be contaminated with PFAS.
What happened to MAHA?
The mobility scooter industry donated a gold plated fork lift truck to the president and its back to business as usual.
Must be rendered immobile by all that beef tallow.
rendered... i see what you did there ;)
It was always a farce that only incredibly stupid people fell for. I mean, even their most "well meaning" gestures were promoting saturated fat, unpasteurized milk and tallow. Those already are just spectacularly ignorant, destructive recommendations going against every bit of science.
Now add that they've basically abolished the EPA (want to power your new data center with a phalanx of smog spewing generators running on bunker oil? Eh, go nuts!) and legalized some highly cancerous pesticides to be used on food crops.
Trump a few days ago pardoned some people who he claims were "fixing their cars": They were actually running a commercial operation removing emissions systems on diesel heavy equipment (a so-called "delete"), and the impact of "rolling coal" is overwhelming and hugely negative, making a single vehicle pollute more than hundreds. But hey, what's the harm in particulate and NOx, besides lung damage, worker health and reduced lifespans?
This vile, corrupt administration hates Americans and wants to see you all die. There is no other possible interpretation. It is simply astonishing that there is some subset of profoundly gullible and/or unintelligent clowns who still support this busted kleptocracy. What a disgrace.
Obviously you're right, but none of this stuff matters to the dudes who worship him. As long as he keeps making the people they hate angry they'll support him, even at their own expense
Based on his push ups and chinups, i hoped there would be a national mandate of exercise for children aka recess and gym class.
I'm not usually classified as "incredibly stupid" so your comment is off tone and not aligned with HN's standards of conversation.
I made an objective statement of fact.
RFK Jr. has clearly been a dangerously misinformed clown for years, loosely holding a plethora of opinions straight from the dumbest parts of YouTube/Twitter. I cannot fathom the thought process of someone who would think "oh he is a nutritional nightmare, sounds like the high-school dropout uncle who gets all of his information from chiropractors on YouTube, but he does a couple of pushups so maybe he'll be alright".
Worse still, he was clearly a foolish pawn for Chairman Trump and his administration full of dismantle everything industrialists.
What's wrong with unpasteurized milk and beef tallow?
>What's wrong with unpasteurized milk
A substantially increased risk of disease.
>What's wrong with [...] beef tallow?
A substantially increased risk of heart disease.
Think. Why did we start to pasteurize?
Not surprising at all. What are "action levels" supposed to do? It's basically a helpful suggestion to take action, but you don't have to. FDA obviously doesn't care about the well-being of anyone.
The article fails to mention risk and the amounts that create those. In typical journalist fashion it just emphasizes the word “chemical” and other scary framings.
True. The risk is heavily downplayed, since the health effects manifest in decades and can be blamed on lifestyle factors, while the amounts causing health issues are in the order of parts per trillion.
if a request doesn't come with a minimum $2 Million check attached or crypto transfer, nothing will get done this decade
it's going to be a health and science dark ages for US
No Tylenol for y'all, but I'll shout the whole bar another round of PFAS!
> They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they can persist for thousands of years in the environment, and are designed to be indestructible.
But _not_ autism! Autism is the great evil we have chosen as our individual health enemy. I don't see autism listed, you may pass.
I think you mean PFOS and not PFAS, the relationship of cancers and health risks is linked to PFOS, but not PFAS in general at this time. PFOS in consumer-facing products were also majority phased out back in 2015.
I mean what did we expect? This admin’s entire MO has been dismantle or de-fang what little regulatory framework we have left.
Did they really think RFK Jr. was ushering in a healthier, “more natural” America?
Yes. But of course "healthier" is describing the health of brain worms. On the bright side, this probably indicates that the reactionaries' pushes to lower the intelligence of the population are reaching a point of diminishing returns, as they've now had to turn to parasites to continue the trend.
Turns out it's easier to make conspiracies than effective policy. Who knew?
Whenever I see something like this, I'm always curious how the libertarians rationalize their world view. Because this is what they want: no regulations where companies can do whatever they want. And they will.
We're witnessing the looting of America. Every level of government seems increasingly dedicated to transferring wealth from the taxpayer to the wealthy. But even that's not sufficient. Apparently the wealthy also need to poison the land and people too for an uptick in profits. Why should they care? Capital is mobile. They'll simply leave whenever society collapses.
As a not libertarian, it's pretty simple. Look at Patagonia[1] for how the free market addresses this issue. If people care, markets will cater to them.
[1]https://www.patagonia.com/our-footprint/pfas.html
From the article:
>The agency said it plans to set less non-binding “action levels” that do not require contaminated food to be removed from shelves. “Tolerance levels”, or limits, make it illegal to sell food contaminated beyond a set threshold.
From the FDA
>Action levels and tolerances represent limits at or above which FDA will take legal action to remove products from the market.
Typical junk tier rage bait journalism you can expect from the guardian.
You can read the FDA letter itself: https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2023-P-4826-0015
Your comment does not give a correct impression of FDA's position here.
Action levels are correctly described by the article and not by whatever FDA quote you provided, which seems to imply the FDA is required to take action to remove products. Surpassing action levels do not require FDA to remove products from the market.
Here is the FDA document I got the quote from
https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2020-D-1956-0001
That article was written in 2000. You might as well be quoting the Articles of Confederation.
This is correct. So much misinformation being spouted here on the spurious grounds that The Guardian is an inaccurate news source.
I can not find it in the FDA list. Is there a newer source?