Most Australians have paid the price after a US manufacturer deliberately covered up the hazardous effects of one its widely used compounds, legal documents show.
This wasn’t your typical gossip around the office water cooler. As two 3M employees met over coffee at the Fortune 500 company’s sprawling corporate headquarters in Minnesota more than 40 years ago, one of them had something startling to get off his chest.
World-leading health experts have warned Australians should be concerned at the levels of forever chemicals they have been exposed to historically and the thousands that remain in circulation in everyday household products such as cosmetics and cleaning products. “It’s hard to fathom how a chemical manufactured at two factories, two little specks relative to the size of the entire planet, could be the source of so much harm,” he said.
A type of forever chemical called perfluorooctane sulfonate became the key ingredient in the company’s famous Scotchgard fabric protector as well as Scotchban, a grease-repelling treatment for food packaging that hit the market in 1970.Average levels in Australians were soon higher than those in the populations of India, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Belgium, Sri Lanka and Peru, although they remained lower than in the US.
East Carolina University professor Jamie DeWitt pointed out the 20.8 nanogram level would be considered “high risk” according to a 2022 report by the“In other words, health care providers should be elevating their standards of care for specific disease risks in patients with this level of PFAS in their blood,” said DeWitt, an expert on forever chemicals.
“Some negative health effects may occur with concentrations … below EPA’s ability to detect,” the US EPA said last year as it ruled there was no safe level of the chemicals in drinking water. “Clearly one could argue this is evidence of a reckless indifference to their fellow Americans and people everywhere,” Douglas said.
Lewis Lehr, the former chair and chief executive of 3M, pictured at the company’s Australian headquarters in Pymble in 1985.The son of corn farmers from Nebraska, Lewis Lehr rose to become chief executive of 3M in the critical period from 1979 to 1986. Hodge recommended the carcinogenicity of the chemicals should be examined and warned if they were found to be widespread in the population and had long half-lives, “we could have a serious problem”. That phrase was later deleted from the meeting minutes.
The 3M spokeswoman said the company was committed to providing accurate information about PFAS with appropriate context. “Jack was from Cornell but he ran a private little side business where he analysed racehorse blood serum in New York state for dopers and cheaters; is that fair to say?” Douglas asked Bacon during his deposition.Henion diligently attempted to find some clean samples from a blood bank – also known as “blanks” – to compare to the contaminated worker samples. The penny dropped: there were no clean samples.
Reich had a sudden change of heart two months later, sending a letter to the US EPA disclosing that PFOS was widespread in the environment and human blood.
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