They might even make it stick

[torquill]

FDA moving to ban chemical used to make Teflon

From what I gather from three different articles on ABC news, the chemical is called zonyl. It breaks down in the body into ammonium perfluorooctanoate, known as C-8 or PFOA, which causes cancer and other organ damage in lab animals. It's found in everyone's blood now.

Other sources of PFOA
It's used in the coatings on pans, but also in candy wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, and fast food wrappings, to keep the oil from soaking through the paper. And it gets ingested with the food, to bioaccumulate in the body.

DuPont is being sued, on allegations that they covered up the fact that the chemical is ingested in far higher amounts than they predicted and stays in the body, which they hadn't expected.

Comments

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

"This program calls on virtually eliminating those uses in those products and substituting with other materials that aren't displaying any levels of concern," Hazen said.

Which is to say "We're eliminating the chemical we know is bad for people and replacing it with a range of compounds that we haven't yet found the downsides of."

Chemical - noun - a substance that causes cancer in laboratory rats.
Of course, research causes cancer in lab rats. Even the control groups.

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

If one didn't know better, one would think you were cynical or something.


I'm just thinking that this article was written by, and for, people for whom "chemical" is a dirty word. Case in point: it took scouring three articles on the subject to find a reference which was not simply to "the chemical", and some clever acronym-unpacking to link the three given names of the breakdown product.

"The chemical" this, and that about "the chemical". Nails on the chalkboard of ignorance.

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

It could be worse. They could have used the term "nuclear".

If you want to scare me, show me replicated proof that a given compound or circumstance causes cancer in laboratory sharks. Then I'll take notice. Until we get there, I tend not to care that much. When the average lifespan was 50 years, no-one worried about cancer. The longer we live, the more we begin to notice the body breaking down and wearing out.

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

True enough -- though it never helps to throw gas on the fire, as the plethora of carcinogens we are exposed to seems to do. Some cancers are also striking younger and younger people.

What is more telling, and (IMO) more important, is the apparent teratogenic effects. Cancer is what's probably going to get most of us, sooner or later -- but women shouldn't be giving birth to malformed children.

Whether that only happens at high doses -- and thus, perhaps, DuPont should take care to put any preganant women on leave from the plant -- is another debate. If it only happens to those who are working on the line, is it still a sufficient health risk to merit pulling it completely?