“Chemicals forever” are everywhere. Most of their health effects are unknown

Substances are called “chemicals forever” due to their longevity. The PFAS consists of carbon atoms and fluorine atoms together. It is one of the strongest known chemical bonds.

“It is these strong carbon fluorite links that make PFA so durable but also make them impossible to degrade,” said Leuthner.

This is why, once they are produced, they tend to stay. They accumulate and decompose mainly.

“Any PFAS that is already in the environment is there to stay,” said Leuthner.

This is what happened in the Cape Fear river in North Carolina, where released chemicals in the navigable path by a chemical manufacturing plant has left the downstream communities in the grip with contaminated drinking water for decades.

This is also what members of the service and residents living near North Carolina Fort Bragg And Hundreds of other military sites across the country, where the PFAS of the fire fighting foam has made its way in the groundwater, contaminate private wells Used by nearby residents.

Today, Almost everyone In the United States Pfas in their blood. Their use is so widespread that PFAs even appeared polar bear and in the In the middle of the open ocean.

These chemicals exist in more than 14,000 forms. While several were linked has health problemssuch as cancer,, Lower birth weight And Damage caused by the liverThe vast majority have never been tested. The potential effects of exposure health are unknown.

And while some PFAs are more manufactured In the United States, they are still in older or imported products, and new replacement chemicals continue to take their place.

So what are we doing? Duke researchers say that there can be a way to help fill the knowledge gap – using tiny transparent to transparent.

Toxicity is not a single size

In a recent studyA Duke team led by Leuthner, Baugh and Heather Stapleton Duke exposed Nicholas school C. Elegans Towards at different doses of 13 PFAS chemicals – some old, some more recent – then measured the effects of chemicals on their growth.

When they compared the worms treated at the PFAS to verses which have not been exposed, they found that all the chemicals they tested slowed down the growth of worms. But some PFAs have wreaked havoc in much lower doses than others, the researchers revealed.

The most toxic chemical, the PFOSA, was a thousand times more toxic than the least toxic chemical, PFBA.

In addition, all the strains of Ver did not respond in the same way. Some strains have undergone undesirable effects at lower doses of certain chemicals than others, suggesting differences in sensitivity that are rooted in their genes.

“This is the first proof that genetic variation contributes to the sensitivity to the toxicity of the PFAS,” said Leuthner.

The risks to the health of worms may seem a trivial concern.

But many genes causing disease in humans have counterparts in worms. And humans and worms also share many of the same metabolic and developmental paths, said Leuthner.

High speed tests

In addition, the small size and rapid development of worms means that researchers can study the effects of various chemicals on a large number of them within a relatively short time.

Traditional toxicity tests in animals such as mice and rabbits can take more than a year to finish; While similar experiences in worms take less than a week.

The work is part of a larger Study funded by NIH aimed at using worms to better predict the most likely to harm people’s health.

The idea is to locate variants of genes which, if counterparts exist in humans, could help identify people who can be more sensitive to certain environmental pollutants than in others because of their genetic composition.

“It’s really critical, because humans are genetically diverse,” said Leuthner.

In a next step, researchers work to pin the genes responsible for the differences they have found.

Work could help identify people or populations who could be particularly sensitive, or help identify APFs not tested with the most damage to harm and report them for a future study.

“It could really speed up tests and regulations,” said Leuthner.

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (R01ES029930, P42 ES010356 and F32-ES034954) and the Duke Department of Biology.