PFAS vs. Malaria -- Unintended Consequences

[NationalTitles18]

I don't know about that. Perhaps they did do some animal testing way back when.

I have a link in an earlier comment talking about the suits.

 

[TexasBama]

I’m having a hard time buying into mosquitoes lighting onto bedding nets is reducing mosquito populations at all. Besides, I don’t think I want to sleep under a net that literally kills mosquitoes. I fear breathing harmful fumes or the insecticide being absorbed through the skin.

well, the good news is you don’t have to worry about health effects from PFAS.

 

[TexasBama]

US EPA will be publishing a standard for PFAS in drinking water within the next year. I expect the water systems impacted will be mostly surface water sources. The treatment methods will not be fun. Reverse Osmosis - hard to operate, what to do with the reject stream? Deepwell injection? Activated Carbon - easy to operate, but what to do with the spent carbon - incineration? Ion Exchange - not a lot of folks operate these in the water industry, and there’s still a PFAS-rich concentrate to dispose of. I’m hoping none of my clients have an issue - I’m about backlogged to retirement anyway.

 

[NationalTitles18]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/02/us/video/pfas-forever-chemicals-farmland-food-biosolids-digvid

 

[mdb-tpet]

Government is absolutely atrocious at foreseeing consequences. Or even identifying after the fact the the unforeseen consequences are bad A drunk bull in a china shop. Blunder after blunder.

Companies are no better from what I've seen. Dupont. Dow. Monsanto. You know the drill. It doesn't take even a master's degree to ask and then test, "what happens to fish and insects when this chemical gets into a stream".

 

[TIDE-HSV]

Companies are no better from what I've seen. Dupont. Dow. Monsanto. You know the drill. It doesn't take even a master's degree to ask and then test, "what happens to fish and insects when this chemical gets into a stream".

Or people, as in Decatur and other communities downstream of the chemical plants...

 

[jthomas666]

As with many things totally unrelated to this topic, simply abolishing the immediate problem is often not the full answer. That type of incomplete and lazy thinking can cause downstream problems that nobody thought about.

Is the "lazy thinking" here the decision to use PFAs in the first place, or the debate that you say is a simple binary of "go back to PFAs or not"? Did they even know what a "forever chemical" was back then? Granted, a more Marxist reading would be to conclude that the US, supplanting the French as the colonial presence in Panama, didn't give a damn about long term consequences other than the profits that would roll in once the canal was completed. (Similarly, the GOP didn't give a damn about the long term-consequences of nominating Trump in 2015--they just wanted to return to power.)

To illustrate:

In this model, Michael Palin represents the mosquitoes, quite annoying. John Cleese, as the colonizer, eschews any thought of a considered approach, instead responding with immediate and overwheming force. It is the Corporal Hicks model of colonial management--Nuke the site from orbit; it's the only way to be sure.

In the second place, are the people currently making the To PFA or Not to PFA "There are our only two options, pick one that we will use from now until the end of time", or are they saying, "Well we have this problem NOW--which of the two currently available but imperfect options will we use for the time being? When a better solution becomes available, we can revisit the situation."

Sometimes there's a tendancy--not just here, but everywhere--to use 20/20 hindsight in our condemnation of historical decisions. Sure, sometimes they may have not asked the correct questions--but it's also possible that they made the best decision they could with the information they had available.

Or to put it another way--a way that may or may not be clearer, depending on the reader's cultural awareness--is this a matter of selecting from a box of Bernie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, or selecting something from the Whizzo Quality Assortment?

PS: Thanks to ongoing back issues coupled with yet another blown disc, this time in my neck, I am, at this moment, rather heavily medicated.

Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk.

 

[TexasBama]

Or people, as in Decatur and other communities downstream of the chemical plants...

I woked for 3M summers when I was in college. I worked at the film plant - their other plant was involved with flouroplastics. Daikin, which opened around 1992, also makes flouroplastics.

Two of the 6 compound on the EPA list were phased out 20+ years ago. Their replacement, which is also on the EPA list, of course has similar health hazards.

I did some work at what was then Ciba Geigy near Mobile before I moved to Texas. That plant had made DDT, and Ciba Geigy had to put in a groundwater cleanup system because of the DDT plume in the groundwater. I'll never forget seeing their old tank farm. It had concrete wall diking around the tanks - good - but the floors in the tank farm were oyster shells. (insert face palm)

 

[jthomas666]

I woked for 3M summers when I was in college. I worked at the film plant - their other plant was involved with flouroplastics. Daikin, which opened around 1992, also makes flouroplastics.

Two of the 6 compound on the EPA list were phased out 20+ years ago. Their replacement, which is also on the EPA list, of course has similar health hazards.

I did some work at what was then Ciba Geigy near Mobile before I moved to Texas. That plant had made DDT, and Ciba Geigy had to put in a groundwater cleanup system because of the DDT plume in the groundwater. I'll never forget seeing their old tank farm. It had concrete wall diking around the tanks - good - but the floors in the tank farm were oyster shells. (insert face palm)

Chemical companies really are the perfect model for colonialism...

 

[TexasBama]

Chemical companies really are the perfect model for colonialism...

Well, they call them chemical plants. Plant being short for plantation perhaps.

 

[TIDE-HSV]

My mother had malaria while carrying me, so I was born with a high IgE count, plus several other immunoglobulins specific to parasites. Well, the test for AGS, mammal allergy, is IgE. Of course, I have been bitten by Lone Star ticks, so I'll never really know to what degree I really exhibit sensitivity to the AG epitope...