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while pregnant women drink Water which comes from wells downstream of contaminated sites PFASKnown as “Forever” chemicals, risk for them children, Health substantial increase, a new Study found. These risks also include the possibility of reduced Birth birth weight, prematurity and infant mortality.
Even more troubling, our team of economic researchers and hydrologists found that exposure to PFAS increases the likelihood of extremely low birth weight and extremely premature birth, which are strongly linked to lifelong health challenges.
What Wales showed us about PFAS risks
PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have attracted the attention of the public and regulators in recent years and for good reason. These man-made compounds persist in the environment, accumulate in the human body and can cause harm even at extremely low concentrations.
Most of the current knowledge about the reproductive effects of PFAS comes from laboratory studies on animals such as rats or the correlation between PFAS levels in human blood and health outcomes.
Both approaches have important limitations. Rats and humans have different bodies, performance and living conditions. And independent factors, such as kidney function, may be the real drivers of health problems in some cases.
We wanted to learn about the real-world effects of PFAS on human life in a way that was as close to a randomized experiment as possible. It would be unethical to intentionally expose people to PFAS, but the environment has given us a natural experiment of our own.
We looked at the locations of the wells that supply New Hampshire residents drinking water And how those locations relate to birth outcomes.
We collected data on all births in the state from 2010 to 2019 and zoomed in on 11,539 births that occurred within 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) of a site known to be contaminated with PFAS and where the mothers were served by public water systems. Some contamination came from industries, others from landfills or firefighting activities.
PFAS from contaminated sites slowly move through the soil into groundwater, where they move downstream with groundwater flow. This created a simple but powerful paradox: Pregnant women whose households received water from wells located downstream, in terms of groundwater, from a PFAS source were likely to be exposed to PFAS from a contaminated site, but women who received water from wells upstream from those locations were not likely to be exposed.
Using external data on PFAS testing, we confirmed that PFAS levels were indeed higher in “downstream” wells than in “upstream” wells.
About the authors
Derek Lemoine and Ashley Langer are professors of economics at the University of Arizona and Bo Guo is an associate professor of hydrology. This article was first published Conversation And it is republished under a Creative Commons license. read the original article,
The location of utilities’ drinking water wells is sensitive data that is not publicly available, so women likely would not know whether they were exposed. Before the state started testing for PFAS in 2016, they might not even know there was PFAS at a nearby site.
PFAS linked to riskiest births
We found what we believe is clear evidence of the harm caused by PFAS exposure.
Women who received water from wells downstream of PFAS-contaminated sites were on average 43% more likely to give birth to a low-birth-weight baby, defined as less than 5.5 pounds (2,500 g) at birth, compared with women who were not receiving water from upstream wells with no other nearby PFAS sources. Downstream there was a 20% higher chance of preterm birth, defined as before 37 weeks, and a 191% higher chance of the infant not surviving the first year.
Per 100,000 births, this translates to 2,639 additional low birth weight births, 1,475 additional premature births, and 611 additional deaths in the first year of life.
Looking at the cases involving the lowest birth weight and prematurity, we found that women who obtained water from wells downstream from PFAS sources were 180% more likely to have a baby weighing less than 2.2 pounds (1,000 grams) and 168% more likely to be born before 28 weeks, compared with women who had wells upstream. Per 100,000 births, this is approximately 607 additional extremely low birth weight births and 466 additional extremely preterm births.
PFAS contamination is costly
When considering regulations to control PFAS, expressing the benefits of PFAS cleanup in monetary terms helps compare them to the costs of cleanup.
Researchers use a variety of methods to put a dollar value on the costs of low-birth-weight and premature births, based on their higher medical bills, later poor health and reduced lifetime earnings.
We used New Hampshire data and the locations of PFAS-contaminated sites in 11 other states with expanded PFAS testing to estimate the costs of PFAS exposure related to low birth weight, preterm birth, and infant mortality nationwide.
The results are eye-opening. We estimate that the effects of PFAS on low birth weight each year result in a cost to society of approximately US$7.8 billion over the lifetime of those babies, with more babies being born each year.
We found that the effects of PFAS on preterm birth and infant mortality result in approximately $5.6 billion in losses over the lifetime of infants born each year in the US, with some of these costs overlapping with costs associated with low birth weight.
An analysis prepared for the American Water Works Association estimated that removing PFAS from drinking water to meet EPA’s PFAS limits would cost utilities alone $3.8 billion on an annual basis. These costs may ultimately fall on water customers, but the broader public also bears most of the costs of harm to fetuses.
We believe that the reproductive health benefits of protecting water systems from PFAS contamination alone can justify EPA’s rule.
PFAS treatment
There is still much to learn about the risks and harms caused by PFAS.
We studied the health effects of PFOA and PFOS, the two “long-chain” species of PFAS that were the most widely used in the U.S. They are no longer produced in the U.S., but they are still present in soil and groundwater. Future work may focus on newer, “short-chain” PFAS, which may have different health effects.
PFAS are in a variety of products, and there are many routes of exposure, including through food. Effective treatments to remove PFAS from water are an area of ongoing research, but the long-chain PFAS we studied can be removed from water with activated carbon filters, either at the utility level or inside one’s home.
Our results indicate that pregnant women have particular reason to be concerned about exposure to long-chain PFAS through drinking water. If pregnant women suspect that their drinking water may contain PFAS, we believe they should strongly consider installing water filters that can remove PFAS and then replacing those filters on a regular schedule.