Shownotes Transcript
Well, there's a big announcement today in the fight against forever chemicals. And federal parliament will hold a national inquiry into the dangers posed by forever chemicals. Now, these are things like PFAS that stick around literally forever in the environment. And they work their way into our foods. And there is reports they can cause serious health issues. Not reports, that's the science. They can cause serious health issues.
And I must say, well done to the journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald, specifically Carrie Fellner, because she's been reporting these dangerous chemicals in Australian water, other household products, at air bases for years and years and years and years. And finally, after all this work, the federal government has responded. Carrie Fellner, she's the Herald journalist behind it all. Phenomenal job. She's on the line. G'day, Carrie.
Good afternoon. Thanks so much. It's a lot of work you've put into it. I've been reading these stories for years and years and years. Firstly, I think people, when we read the story yesterday about these forever chemicals being in our water treatment plants, being found in our water treatment plants, do we have a reason to be concerned?
Yeah, I mean, well, I would love to say that we don't. As someone who's lived pretty much my whole life in Sydney and always drunk the water, the same as everyone else, and always felt confident that it was safe. But the thing that we've seen with PFAS over the last 10 years or so that I've been following this
is that the science has grown more and more grave over that time about the threat that these pose to human health. And the level at which that threat is expected to sort of affect people has kept dropping and dropping and dropping over that time. And over that time, we've seen sort of Australia following the US in its decisions. So in 2018, the US and Australia were both on par in saying what
safe level was. Since then, the US has done an extraordinary amount of work investigating the health effects of these chemicals. And the conclusion that they've come to only recently is that there's actually no safe level, like we see for other substances like asbestos and tobacco. So that's quite concerning for
the trace levels that we have in our water supply here. And that's why the government has launched this review to see how the US arrived at that decision. I was reading somewhere where effectively most people in the United States have been exposed to PFAS, especially PFOS and PFOA at some point in their lives, which means most Americans have PFAS in their blood. What does that mean if you're talking about hundreds of millions of people?
Yeah, well, in fact, one of the most startling things throughout my investigations was when I found some calculations that were done by the manufacturer 3M. And they basically, you know, they'd been studying these chemicals since the 1960s. And they came up with what they thought a safe level was. And the level that Australians had in their blood at that time was about
20 times higher than what the manufacturer 3M thought was safe. And so that is, as you mentioned, for this chemical PFOS that most of us have been exposed to from using Scotchgard and from fast food packaging.
So the kinds of things that we're seeing PFAS linked to is high cholesterol, suppression of the immune system, certain types of cancers, interference with hormones, those kinds of things. And I think that's the thing that's most concerning about PFAS, that they seem to be linked to so many different parts of the body and so many different kinds of adverse health effects. Which also makes it hard to pin down, right? So how do you rewind this thing then?
Yeah, well, that's a really good question. You know what I mean? Like, we are where we are, so where do we go now? Yeah, true. And what we're seeing in some parts of the world is, like, the entire European Union and parts of America are trying to enact these kinds of blanket bans on PFAS, where they just eliminate the entire class of chemicals. But as you can imagine, that's incredibly difficult because we have about 900 different products in Australia that have forever chemicals in them.
So once the genie's out of the bottle, it's an enormous challenge for regulators to put it back in. Carrie, it'll be a fascinating federal inquiry. I'm sure you'll be all over it and well done because I know you've been dogged in this pursuit and you deserve some credit. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. That's Carrie Felner. She's a journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald.
