Teflon Pollutes The World: Deadly Chemical Spreads Into Global Water Supplies

Originally published at MintPress News.

WILMINGTON, Delaware — Earlier this month, climate and health activists from West Virginia and Ohio met with their Dutch counterparts to discuss the pollution caused by a chemical that was once a key ingredient in the non-stick coating Teflon.

Members of Keep Your Promises, DuPont, a group targeting contamination caused by PFOA, also known as C-8 in the United States, traveled to Dordrecht, Holland, to compare notes on this toxic chemical once dumped from a factory there. That factory, once owned by DuPont, was sold to Chemours, a spinoff company, last year.

PFOA has become so ubiquitous in water and food supplies that 98 percent of the U.S. population has trace amounts in their bloodstream, but amounts rise dramatically for factory workers and even residents who live in proximity to factories where PFOA was produced. Paul Brooks, a physician from West Virginia who was part of the group that traveled to the Netherlands, told The Intercept that the Dutch were largely ignorant of chemical’s dangers.

“They knew absolutely nothing about the links to disease, nothing,” he told Sharon Lerner, who further reported that the chemical has been linked to “preeclampsia, ulcerative colitis, […]

Full article: Teflon Pollutes The World: Deadly Chemical Spreads Into Global Water Supplies