Contamination of your drinking water from PFAS chemicals could also pose a threat to your health.
Municipalities in Rhode Island and all across the country are taking advantage of settlement money to remove them from drinking water.
PFAS can be found in just about everything, but there are a few things you can do to reduce your exposure.
“PFAS or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances are a diverse class of chemicals. There’s thousands of them, and they’re known as the forever chemicals because they have a very long environmental half-life,” said Joseph Braun, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Children’s Environmental Health at Brown University’s School of Public Health.
He’s been studying the impacts of these forever chemicals on children and adults.
“Moms who are exposed to PFAS during pregnancy, their children have lower birth weight. We also know that PFAS exposure during pregnancy or childhood may be associated with lower vaccine response in children. In adults we know that PFAS can cause elevations and cholesterol levels and increase the risk of Associated Diseases with that,” Braun said.
He says these chemicals are man-made and they’ve been around since the 1940s and 50s.
They can be found in just about everything you come in contact with on a daily basis.
“Stain and water repellent textiles so things like rain jackets or athletic wear. They’re also used in things like dental floss or other nonstick coatings,” Braun said.
There are some ways you can reduce your exposure.
“Trying to eliminate eating foods from fast food is good because many fast-food packaging packages contain PFAS. So the greaseproof wrappers often contain PFAS. So eliminating than installing a water filter is one way to reduce PFAS exposure,” Braun said.
Braun says moving forward he’d like to see PFAS regulated as an entire class of contaminants rather than individually.
”Regulating them as a class will allow us to not be playing the chemical Whack a Mole game where we’re trying to regulate one PFAS at a time and instead we just say we’re going to limit the use of all PFAS and make sure that levels in drinking water of all PFAS are below some threshold, said Brown University Associate Professor of Epidemiology Joe Braun.
Braun says it’s great that local municipalities are taking advantage of some of the settlement funding to start to remedy the drinking water.
He says this is likely just the beginning of what could be a lengthy legal battle.