Last week, we learned that the Food and Drug Administration had detected PFAS compounds in pineapple, sweet potato, meat, and chocolate cake. The presence of industrial compounds in our food became public with the aid of the Environmental Working Group after a group of workers and members of the Environmental Defense Fund took pictures of the research at a systematic European convention.
While the FDA fields questions about why it didn’t gift this data to the general public itself (the enterprise released the statistics together with a declaration on Tuesday), it has become clear that 3M, the employer that at first developed PFOS and PFOA, had known for a very long time that these toxic and chronic chemical compounds had been in our food.
According to the 2001 observation sponsored using 3M, 12 samples of meals from around the United States of America — along with floor pork, bread, apples, and green beans — examined high quality for both PFOA and PFOS. One piece of bread had 14 seven-hundred elements in step with trillion of PFOA, though the document cited that the sample became considered “suspect.”
The Environmental Protection Agency has regarded the observation for years, but it is unclear if the FDA was privy to the research. The Environmental Working Group referred to the 3M study in a 2002 file on PFAS chemical compounds and alerted the Centers for Disease Control.
On Tuesday, lawyer Rob Bilott wrote to the FDA to ask “the extent to which FDA becomes aware of the statistics gathered on behalf of the 3M organization in 2001 that confirmed elevated degrees of PFAS inside the U.S. Food supply.” In 1999, Bilott sued DuPont over PFOA infection around its plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where the employer used the chemical to make Teflon. Through his litigation, he received many files about PFAS, which he has because he supplied to the EPA, FDA, and other federal organizations.
