Nghiên cứu cho thấy 'Hóa chất mãi mãi' của PFAS phổ biến trong nước ngọt trên toàn thế giới
cuộc khảo sát toàn cầu cho thấy mức độ có hại ngay cả trong các mẫu nước có nguồn ô nhiễm rõ ràng
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They’re in makeup, dental floss and menstrual products (sản phẩm kinh nguyệt). They’re in nonstick pans and takeout food wrappers. Same with rain jackets and firefighting equipment, as well as pesticides and artificial turf on sports fields.
They’re PFAS: a class of man-made chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They are also called “forever chemicals” because the bonds in their chemical compounds (hợp chất hóa học) are so strong they don’t break down for hundreds to thousands of years, if at all.
For their research, Dr. O’Carroll and his colleagues gathered nearly 300 previously published studies on PFAS in the environment. Together, these studies included 12,000 samples from surface water — streams, rivers, ponds and lakes — and 33,900 samples from groundwater wells, collected over the past 20 years. These samples don’t cover the whole planet: they are concentrated in places with more environmental researchers, like the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and the Pacific Coast of Asia.
This research does an admirable job (công việc đáng ngưỡng mộ) of collecting the available data and highlighting the extent of global contamination from PFAS chemicals, said David Andrews, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization, who was not involved in this study.
Scientific research on the health effects (ảnh hưởng sức khỏe) of PFAS has evolved significantly in the past 10 to 20 years, he said, and what are considered safe exposure levels now are a tiny fraction of what they were a few decades ago.
For example, some outdoor clothing brands are moving away from PFAS for waterproofing their products and toward alternatives (hướng tới lựa chọn thay thế) like silicones. Fast food restaurants can wrap their burgers in paper that’s been treated with heat to make it grease-resistant, or coated in a PFAS-free plastic instead. The Department of Defense is beginning to replace traditional firefighting foam with an alternative called fluorine-free foam, or F3.
source: nytimes,
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