User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Timeline of events related to perfluorooctanoic acid

This timeline was moved to the main article space at Timeline of events related to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)

==Comparison of definitions and descriptions of PFAS.


 * Per- and Poly-fluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) are


 * a group of man-made chemicals


 * Per- and Poly-fluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) have been used since
 * 1950s


 * Per- and Poly-fluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) have been used in
 * "household and industrial products"


 * Per- and Poly-fluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) products include
 * non-stick cookware


 * food packaging


 * stain protection applications to fabric, furniture and carpet


 * fire-fighting foams


 * Per- and Poly-fluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) have been used for characteristics include
 * heat resistant


 * oil resistant


 * stain resistant


 * grease resistant


 * water resistant


 * The best known examples of PFAS are
 * perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS)
 * perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA).

"Since 1970, firefighting foams containing PFAS were once used extensively in Australia and elsewhere due to their effectiveness in fighting liquid fuel fires."

This is a dynamic timeline of events related to the development and use of the man-made Fluorosurfactant—polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), particularly perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). Perfluorinated chemicals, are a group of over "4,000" man-made (synthetic) (N2S confirm, get 2nd citation) compounds collectively known" as Fluorosurfactant (PFAS). Perfluorinated compound (PFC), also known as a Perfluorinated chemical or polyfluoroalkyl chemical is an organofluorine compound—a group of over "4,000 compounds collectively known" as Fluorosurfactant (PFAS). PFAS, PFCs, PFOAs only contain carbon-fluorine bonds. "PFAS substances are long carbon chain acids or salts with fluorines attached to most or all the carbons." These compounds do not have C-H bonds or C-C bonds, but they do have other heteroatoms. PFCs, also known as perfluorinated chemicals, (PFC) "have properties that represent a blend of fluorocarbons (containing only C-F and C-C bonds) and the parent functionalized organic species." (N2S summarize, get exact citation) Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOAs) "functions as a carboxylic acid but with strongly altered surfactant and hydrophobic characteristics." Fluorosurfactants have been produced and marketed as Teflon, which is a fluorinated polymer, by DuPont since XXXX, in water resistant textiles since XXXX and fire-fighting foamfluorinated polymers. They have been used to confer hydrophobicity, stain-resistance to fabrics and as fire-fighting foam. since XXXX by XXXX. (N2S confirm, get exact citations)

"Polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are fluorinated organic chemicals, which include perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). PFAS chemicals are persistent and bioaccumulate. Persistent means they do not break down in the environment and bioaccumulate refers to the process of building up over time in the blood and organs...PFAS substances are long carbon chain acids or salts with fluorines attached to most or all the carbons. These were all man-made or breakdown products of man-made chemicals."

Properties of PFCs, such as XXXX, result from the presence of fluorocarbons in the compound that contain only C-F and C-C bonds and the functional group, (N2S confirm, get exact citations) Common functional groups in PFCs are OH, CO2H, chlorine, O, and SO3H are some of the compound functional groups that are contained in perfluorinated compounds (PFC)s, also known as a Perfluorinated chemicals or polyfluoroalkyl chemicals.


 * 1802 Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, who had emigrated from France after the French Revolution, founded a company to produce gunpowder called E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company in Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware.


 * E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company was renamed [[DuPont.


 * 1902 John Dwan, Hermon Cable, Henry Bryan, and William A. McGonagle co-founded Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M) in 1902 in Two Harbors, Minnesota, in 1902. as a corundum mining operation. The men did not know at that time that "corundum was really another low-grade mineral called anorthosite.'


 * 1930 General Motors and DuPont formed Kinetic Chemicals to produce Freon.


 * 1935 On January 22, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Inc., formally opened the Haskell Laboratory of Industrial Toxicology on the grounds of the Experimental Station of the company. It was at that time, "one of the first in-house toxicology facilities." It was established on the advice of a DuPont in-house doctor named George Gehrmann. According to a 1935 news item in the Industrial and Engineering Chemistry journal, the purpose of the du Pont facility was to thoroughly test all du Pont products as a public health measure to determine the effects of du Pont's finished products on the "health of the ultimate consumer " and that the products "are safe" "before they are placed on the market". The the Haskell Laboratory facilities were "not to be employed in the development of compounds useful in therapeutics." The laboratory was named after Harry G. Haskell, du Pont's vice president, whose son, Harry G. Haskell Jr.  was mayor of Wilmington of Wilmington, Delaware from 1969 to 1973, and served as Delaware's Congressman from 1957-1959 W. F. von Oettingen was the first director of Haskell Laboratory of Industrial Toxicology. Lammot du Pont II (1880 – 1952) was president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Inc. from March 15, 1926 until he retired at the age of 60 on May 20, 1940. He was succeeded by Walter S. Carpenter Jr..


 * April 6, 1938 Roy J. Plunkett (1910 – 1994), who was then a 27-year old research chemist who worked at the DuPont's Jackson Laboratory in [[Deepwater, New Jersey, was working with gases related to DuPont's (Kenetic Chemicals? citation needed )Freon refrigerants, when an experiment he was conducting produced an unexpected new product. —tetrafluoroethylene resin. He had accidentally invented polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE), a saturated fluorocarbon polymer—the "first compound in the family of Perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), "to be marketed commercially."(Lyons 2007) It took ten years of research before polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE) was introduced under its trade name Teflon, where it became known for being "extremely heat-tolerant and stick-resistant." In 1985, Plunkett was named to the National Inventors' Hall of Fame for the invention of Teflon, which "has been of great personal benefit to people—not just indirectly, but directly to real people whom I know." Plunkett described the discovery and development at the 1986 American Chemical Society symposium on the History of High Performance Polymers. He said that he and his assistant, Jack Rebok, had opened a tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) cylinder to examine an unusual white powder that had prevented the TFE gas from flowing out. Upon opening the cylinder, they found that the white powder was "packed onto the bottom and lower sides of the cylinder." The sample of gaseous TFE in the cylinder had polymerized spontaneously into a white, waxy solid. The polymer was polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). In 1945, DuPont commercialized PTFE as Teflon. They found that PTFE was resistant to corrosion, had low surface friction, and high heat resistance. Tetrafluorethylene can cyclize with a wide variety of compounds which led the creation of a range of organofluorine compounds, which is why organofluorine chemistry became important to DuPont.


 * 1950 A study on mice undertaken by 3M showed that "PFAS builds up in blood."


 * 1950s For decades—beginning in the 1950s—3M manufactured PFAS at its plant in neighbouring Cottage Grove in Washington County, Minnesota. 3M, with 10,000 employees in in Maplewood in Ramsey County where it is headquartered—is the largest employer in Maplewood.


 * 1950s According to the 2016 lawsuit brought against 3M by Lake Elmo, Minnesota, 3M had "disposed of PFCs and PFC-containing waste at a facility it owned and operated in Oakdale, Minnesota (the "Oakdale Facilities")" during the 1950s. The Environmental Protection Agency Superfund, Oakdale Dump, includes three non-contiguous properties—Abresch, Brockman, and Eberle sites—that 3M used for waste disposal "from the late 1940s until the 1950s". The Oakdale Dump contaminated residential drinking water wells with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and heavy metals. It was converted into a city park after extensive cleanup.(citation?


 * 1951 "The DuPont chemical plant in Washington, West Virginia, began using PFOA in its manufacturing process."


 * 1954 R. A. Dickison, who was employed at DuPont, received an inquiry about C8's "possible toxicity."


 * 1956 A study undertaken by Gordon I. Nordby and J. Murray Luck at Stanford University found that "PFAS binds to proteins in human blood."


 * 1960s DuPont "buried about 200 drums of C8 on the banks of the Ohio River near the plant."


 * 1961 A DuPont in-house toxicologist said C8 was toxic and should be "handled with extreme care." According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), the DuPont toxicologist reported that "Teflon chemicals cause liver enlargement in rats and rabbits."


 * 1962 3D moved its headquarters from Saint Paul, Minnesota—where it had been located since 1910, to its headquarters at 3M Center in [[Maplewood, Minnesota.


 * 1965 John Zapp, who was then director of DuPont's Haskell Laboratories, "received a memo describing preliminary studies that showed that even low doses of a related surfactant could increase the size of rats’ livers, a classic response to exposure to a poison."


 * early 1970s According to court documents in the lawsuit against 3M, the company had "disposed of PFCs and PFC-containing waste at the city of Lake Elmo's Washington County Landfill".


 * 1970s The Quartz said that according to a document on file with the US Environmental Protection Agency, and discovered by The Intercept's Sharon Lerner in June 2019, reported that the document was on file with the US Environmental Protection Agency, that Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M) "knew as early as the 1970s that PFAS was accumulating in human blood." 3M's own experiments on rats and monkeys concluded that PFAS compounds "should be regarded as toxic."


 * 1973 "DuPont finds there is no safe level of exposure to C8/PFOA in animals."


 * 1976 "3M begins testing some workers’ blood for PFOA and finds it in almost every one tested."


 * 1970s In the 1970s researchers at 3M documented the presence of PFOS and PFOA—the "two best-known PFAS compounds"—in fish.


 * 1978 3M scientists, Hugh J. Van Noordwyk and Michael A. Santoro published an article on 3D's hazardous waste program in the Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) journal, which is supported by the United States Department of Health and Human Services's (DHHS) National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), an institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The authors said that 3M considered "thermal destruction of hazardous wastes" as the "best method for their disposal". By 1978, 3M had built seven incineration facilities throughout the United States on "3M manufacturing plant sites at Brownwood, Texas, Cordova, Illinois, Cottage Grove, Minnesota, Decatur, Alabama, Hartford City, Indiana, Nevada, Missouri, and White City, Oregon."


 * September 1982 3D found drums stockpiled and buried deep in the trenches of the Oakdale Dump's Abresch site. {{citation?


 * 1983 Following approval by the Federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in July, 3M, described by The New York Times as a "diversified manufacturing concern" announced their $6 millionclean up of what would become known as the Oakdale Dump. The Times said that is was the "second major clean of a hazardous waste area in Minnesota to be financed entirely by a private company." The three dumps, that had been abandoned by 3M, had "contaminated ground water and soil with hazardous chemical wastes", according to environmental officials. According to the unreferenced Wikipedia article, Oakdale Dump, "3M commissioned a surface cleanup of wastes at the Abresch site beginning in the winter of 1983. During the excavation activities, a total of 11,500 cubic yards of waste material was removed including 4,200 empty drums, 8,700 empty 5-gallon pails, 4,660 cubic yards of contaminated soil, and 15 intact containers that were over-packed. Most of the waste, 11,800 tons, was transported to the 3M Chemolite incinerator in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. An additional 6,500 tons of excavated waste containing more than 50 parts per million (ppm) of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were transported to a hazardous waste landfill for disposal. Excavated soils with low levels of contamination were treated on-site utilizing construction aeration pads. Approximately 173,000 gallons of contaminated water was collected during excavation activities and transported for treatment at the 3M Chemolite facility."


 * 1998 The EPA "was first alerted to the risks" of PFAS—man-made "forever chemicals" that "never break down once released and they build up in our bodies".


 * 2000 In a highly-cited 2001 article in the Environmental Science & Technology, published by the American Chemical Society, John P. Giesy and Kurunthachalam Kannan reported "for the first time, on the global distribution of perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS), a fluorinated organic contaminant." Based on the findings of their 2000 study, Giesy and Kannan said that "PFOS were widely detected in wildlife throughout the world" and that "PFOS is widespread in the environment." They said that "PFOS can bioaccumulate to higher trophic levels of the food chain" and that the "concentrations of PFOS in wildlife are less than those required to cause adverse effects in laboratory animals."

{{quote|"PFOS was measured in the tissues of wildlife, including, fish, birds, and marine mammals. Some of the species studied include bald eagles, polar bears, albatrosses, and various species of seals. Samples were collected from urbanized areas in North America, especially the Great Lakes region and coastal marine areas and rivers, and Europe. Samples were also collected from a number of more remote, less urbanized locations such as the Arctic and the North Pacific Oceans. ... Concentrations of PFOS in animals from relatively more populated and industrialized regions, such as the North American Great Lakes, Baltic Sea, and Mediterranean Sea, were greater than those in animals from remote marine locations. Fish-eating, predatory animals such as mink and bald eagles contained concentrations of PFOS that were greater than the concentrations in their diets."|John P. Giesy and Kurunthachalam Kannan. 2001.}}


 * 2000 3M stopped manufacturing "PFOS (perfluorooctanesulphonate)-based flurosurfactants using the electrochemical flouorination process."


 * 2000 Prior to May 2000, when 3M stopped manufacturing "PFOS (perfluorooctanesulphonate)-based flurosurfactants using the electrochemical flouorination process" which is a "class of chemicals known as perfluorochemicals (PFCs) in a classification of firefighting foam called Aqueous Film Forming Foams (AFFF). Prior to 2000, the "most common PFCs" used in Aqueous Film Forming Foams (AFFF) were "PFOS and its derivatives." According to Robert Avsec, who was Fire Chief Robert Avsec of the Chesterfield, Virginia Fire and EMS Department for 26 years, in fires classified as Class B—which includes fires that are difficult to extinguish, such as "fires that involve petroleum or other flammable liquids"—firefighters use a classification of firefighting foam called Aqueous Film Forming Foams (AFFF) foams. Concerns have been raised about PFCs contaminating groundwater sources.


 * 2002 DuPont's Fayetteville, North Carolina facility began to manufacture C8.


 * 2002 Since 2002, when the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) first developed "Health Based Values for PFOS and PFOA", the MDH has also developed "health-based guidance values for PFOS, PFOA, PFBS, and PFBA, and uses the PFOS value as a surrogate for evaluating PFHxS (in lieu of sufficient PFHxS-specific toxicological information)." MDH had begun partnering with Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to investigate PFAS in "drinking water investigations east of Saint Paul near the 3M Cottage Grove plant and related legacy waste disposal sites in Washington County.


 * 2002 Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) "Public Health Laboratory developed an analytical method tailored to the PFAS found in the 3M waste disposal sites." They also "developed two other methods with longer analyte lists to evaluate AFFF and other sites." These investigations resulted in the discovery of "groundwater contamination covering over 150 square miles, affecting the drinking water supplies of over 140,000 Minnesotans. Over 2,600 private wells have been sampled and 798 drinking water advisories issued.


 * 2003 Weinberg Group's then Vice-President of Product Defense, P. Terrence Gaffney wrote a 5-page letter urging DuPont to prepare a defense strategy for future litigation related to the health impacts of PFOAs in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The letter was mentioned in a Environmental Science & Technology article called the "The Weinberg proposal" by Paul D. Thacker. Gaffney wrote that, "DuPont must shape the debate at all levels." He offered several strategies which included the the establishment of "blue ribbon panels", the coordination of papers on PFOA and on junk science, the "publication of papers and articles dispelling the alleged nexus between PFOA and teratogenicity as well as other claimed harm." DuPont hired the Weinberg Group to help with "scientific third party experts." Gaffney added that Weinberg had experience with similar issues and cited their work regarding Agent Orange in 1983.


 * 2003 Gale D. Pearson, then a local lawyer in Cottage Grove, was one of the first people to look into contaminated ground water in Cottage Grove. In 2003, lawyers had contacted her regarding a personal injury case about contaminagte water near a [DuPont/Chemouris] plant in West Virginia where they manufactured Teflon in a process that used PFOAs, a type of PFAS. She knew that 3M had manufactured PFOAs in their Cottage Grove facility. Pearson discovered through the Environmental Working Group (EWS) that PFAS were not just in Washington County, Minnesota and West Virginia, but all over the world. 3M had dumped waste in the Cottage Grove "when it was still just farmland" and in other nearby farmlands in Washington County. Pearson and her team hired a chemist to test soil and water samples on the properties where 3M had dumped the chemicals. Blood samples from the local population in the affected area were also tested for PFAS. Pearson said that the laboratory tests revealed that there was a "hotspot of contamination in the blood of the community."


 * 2004 PFCs were detected in the Oakdale facilities and the landfill by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and it was "revealed that the PFCs had leached from the Oakdale Facilities and the Landfill into the groundwater aquifers serving as Lake Elmo's drinking water supply."


 * 2005-2006 The C8 Health Project undertaken by the C8 Science Panel "surveyed 69,030 individuals" who had "lived, worked, or attended school for ≥ 1 year in one of six contaminated water districts near the plant between 1950 and 3 December 2004."


 * 2009 3D shut down their Saint Paul Plant. In 1910, 3M had moved its headquarters and manufacturing facilities from Duluth to one building on Forest Street in Dayton's Bluff, Saint Paul, one of Saint Paul's oldest communities on the east side of the Mississippi River. Over the years, it expanded into a 61-acre 3M campus. Whirlpool's factory, Hamm's/Stroh's brewery and other industries were also located along a diagonal that ran through the Dayton Bluff neighbourhood, East 7 Street. The three companies shut down in "rapid succession." when 3D closed down its Dayton's Bluff operation in phases, it was was the last of the three leaving the community. These companies had provided good-paying jobs in the neighborhood so their closing left Dayton Bluff as a "boulevard of broken dreams"—a "once-thriving neighborhood descended into a defeating spiral of decay, witnessed by vacant lots, boarded-up storefronts and rising crime." When the St. Paul's development agency, the Port Authority, took over the campus, it was renamed Beacon Bluff. then the Saint Paul Plant continued to be active until 2009. near the diagonal-running artery that connects one of the East Side's oldest communities directly to downtown St. Paul. a diagonal The East 7 Street, which ran through the Dayton Bluff neighborhood was home to For years, E. 7th Street was St. Paul's own boulevard of broken dreams.


 * 2010 Lake Elmo, Minnesota, a city of about 8,000 people in Washington State, Minnesota—sued 3M when PFAS chemicals, known as 'forever chemicals', were found to have contaminated Lake Elmo's drinking water.


 * 2016 The EPA "published a voluntary health advisory for PFOA and PFOS" which warned that "exposure to the chemicals at levels above 70 parts per trillion, total, could be dangerous."


 * 2016 The city of Lake Elmo, Minnesota sued 3M a second time for polluting their drinking water with PFAS chemicals. 3M filed for a dismissal was refused in 2017.


 * 2016 In a October 17, 2016 article by Robert Avsec, who was Fire Chief Robert Avsec of the Chesterfield, Virginia Fire and EMS Department for 26 years, manufacturers of the firefighting foam had "moved away from PFOS and its derivatives as a result of legislative pressure." They began to develop and market "fluorine-free...firefighting foams"—foams "that do not use fluorochemicals"


 * May 22, 2017 According to a November 2, 2018, Bloomberg article, the Minnesota Health Department (MHD) notified the office of the Mayor of Cottage Grove, Myron Bailey, that the MHD had "set a new, [stricter], lower level for a type of unregulated chemical found in Minnesota's drinking water" and that Cottage Grove's water "would exceed the new threshold" that was necessary to "better protect infants and young children." Bailey called a state of emergency.


 * January 10, 2018 According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) website which was last reviewed on January 10, 2018, the "health effects of PFOS, PFOA, PFHxS, and PFNA have been more widely studied than other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Some, but not all, studies in humans with PFAS exposure have shown that certain PFAS may affect growth, learning, and behavior of infants and older children, lower a woman’s chance of getting pregnant, interfere with the body’s natural hormones, increase cholesterol levels, affect the immune system, and increase the risk of cancer."


 * February 20, 2018 The state of Minnesota "settled its lawsuit against the 3M Company in return for a settlement of $850 million". Their Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) interactive map indicates the location of dozens of wells under advisory because of contaminated ground water in southern Minnesota where Mississippi River winds past Saint Paul's.


 * 2018 Department of Health & Human Services's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) was about to publish its assessment of PFAS chemicals, with a focus on two specific chemicals from the PFAS class—PFOA and PFOS—that have "contaminated water supplies near military bases, chemical plants and other sites from New York to Michigan to West Virginia" which showed that the PFAS chemicals "endanger human health at a far lower level than EPA has previously called safe." The HHS updated ATSDR study would have warned that exposure to PFOA and PFOS at less than one-sixth of the EPAs current guideline of 70 parts per trillion, "could be dangerous for sensitive populations like infants and breastfeeding mothers."


 * January 30, 2018 According to an article by the Center for Science and Democracy's director, Michael Halpern and posted by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), in early 2018, Nancy Beck, Deputy Assistant Administrator at the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP),, the Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM), Office of Research and Development (ORD)—three branches of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—exchanged chains of emails with Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Department of Defense (DoD), HHS, and the Pentagon, to put pressure on the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to censor a report that measured the "health effects" of PFAS that are "found in drinking water and household products throughout the United States." Beck wrote to EPA staff including, Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, Ryan Jackson, and Peter Grevatt, and Mike Flynn (EPA) in regards to "PFAS meeting with ATSDR" that the "implications for susceptible populations came as a surprise to OCSPP staff." Beck is "one of the EPA political appointees with ties to the chemical industry involved in the effort to prevent the study from being released." An email by an unidentified Trump administration aid that was forwarded by Office of Management and Budget's(OMB) James Herz, said that "The public, media, and Congressional reaction to these numbers is going to be huge. The impact to EPA and [the Defense Department] is going to be extremely painful. We (DoD and EPA) cannot seem to get ATSDR to realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be." one unidentified White House aide said in an email forwarded on Jan. 30 by James Herz, a political appointee who oversees environmental issues at the OMB. The email added: “The impact to EPA and [the Defense Department] is going to be extremely painful. We (DoD and EPA) cannot seem to get ATSDR to realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be."


 * March 2018 The Defense of Department's (DoD)'s report to Congress said that test that they conducted showed that the amount of PFAS chemicals in water supplies near 126 DoD facilities, "exceeded the current safety guidelines". The DoD has "used foam containing" PFAS chemicals "in exercises at bases across the country". The DoD therefore, "risks the biggest liabilities" in relation to the use of PFAS chemicals according to Politico.


 * May 14, 2018 Politico gained access to the email chains and published the story in May, saying that Scott Pruitt's EPA had worked with the Trump administration to block the publication of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) report.


 * June 21, 2018 The Department of Health & Human Services's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) 697-page draft report for public comment, "Toxicological Profile for Perfluoroalkyls", was finally released.


 * May 2019 In May 2019, the Stockholm Convention COP "decided to eliminate production and use of two important toxic POPs, PFOA and Dicofol" as recommended by the United Nation's Stockholm Convention's Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee (POPRC-15).


 * May 29, 2019 The city of Lake Elmo, Minnesota and 3M reached a settlement over the drinking water contamination lawsuit. 3M will pay pay $2.7 million to Lake Elmo's water account and will "transfer 180 acres of farmland" to Lake Elmowhich is "valued at $1.8 million."


 * 2019 The state of New Hampshire filed a lawsuit against Dupont, 3M, and other companies, for their roles in the crisis in drinking water contamination in the United States. The lawsuit claims that the polluted water is the result of the manufacture and use of perfluorinated chemicals, a group of more than 4,000 compounds collectively known as PFAS.


 * September 23, 2019 On September 23, 2019 the CDC and ATSDR announced that they had "established cooperative agreements with seven partners to study the human health effects of exposures to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) through drinking water at locations across the nation."


 * September 2019 A federal judge in California issued an order on September 30 allowing a class action case against "3M, DowDuPont, Chemours and six other chemical corporations responsible for producing toxic fluorinated chemicals called PFAS." The "lawsuit was initially filed on behalf of Kevin D. Hardwick, of Glendale, Ohio, who was exposed to PFAS during his 40-year career as a firefighter."


 * September 2019 Andrew Wheeler, an EPA administrator, met with industry lobbyists and said that "Congressional efforts to clean up legacy PFAS pollution in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2020" were "just not workable." Wheeler refuses to "designate PFAS chemicals as "hazardous substances" under the Superfund law."


 * October 2019 A report by the International POPs Elimination Network (IPEN)—a global network of 600 public interest NGOs with the common aim of eliminating persistent organic pollutants—released in October, said there was "unequivocal evidence" that "firefighters using foams made with PFAS have "unacceptably" high levels of two toxic PFAS chemicals in their blood."


 * October 4, 2019 The Environmental Working Group (EWG) released their "analysis of military installations" which found that there were 64 installations where groundwater "exceeded 100,000 parts per trillion" of PFAS. The EWG report listed the "top 100 sites with the highest concentration" of PFAS compounds.


 * October 4, 2019 At the 15th meeting of the United Nation's Stockholm Convention's Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee (POPRC-15) held in Rome, on October 4, over 100 scientific experts representing many countries, "recommended that a group of hazardous chemicals"—"Perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS), its salts, and PFHxS-related compounds"—be eliminated in order to better protect human health and the environment from its harmful impacts." PFHxS and PFHxS-related salts and compounds are a "group of industrial chemicals used widely in a number of consumer goods as a surfactant and sealant including in carpets, leather, clothing, textiles, fire-fighting foams, papermaking, printing inks and non-stick cookware. They are known to be harmful to human health including the nervous system, brain development, endocrine system and thyroid hormone." Perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS) is one of a number of common PFAS chemicals. Other common PFAS chemicals include Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), Perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), Perfluorooctanesulfonamide (PFOSA), perfluoroheptanoic acid (PFHpA), Perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), Perfluorodecanoic acid (PFDA), Perfluorobutane sulfonic acid (PFBS), and Heptafluorobutyric acid (HFBA).

Table
The backbone of polytetrafluoroethylene and related chemicals is the fluorocarbon chain.


 * Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) ;persistent ;bioaccumulative; toxic ;a pollutant.