Media Finally Wakes Up The Dangers Of PFAS Forever Chemicals

There’s been a lot of talk in the media, surprisingly recently about P-F-A-S, PFAS chemicals, and honestly, that is surprising. Filling in this week for Mike Papantonio, Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins is joined by attorney Madeline Pendley explain the dangers associated with this widespread toxin.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

There's been a lot of talk in the media, surprisingly recently about P-F-A-S, PFAS chemicals, and honestly, that is surprising. It's not typically something that we see the media talking about, but I'm joined now by Madeline Pendley. Madeline, we've talked about PFAS here at Ring of Fire on America's Lawyer quite a bit. That's a case that Mike Papantonio has been handling. So obviously we're gonna talk about it. I gotta say, I'm really shocked because on a weekly basis, at least, I will get online check the websites I usually check and I'll see articles about PFAS. This is something the country is actually finally starting to pay attention to.

Exactly. They're finally paying attention. It's not a new issue to your point, and even the litigation's not new. We've really been doing offshoots of the PFAS litigation for over a decade and the main thing that's gotten the attention these days is the settlements, finally, with some of the biggest PFAS manufacturers, 3M and DuPont. So finally, because there's billions of dollars being talked about people are finally looking into the issue.

And it's really interesting too to kind of see how the PFAS issue has evolved, I guess you would say, because of course the first, the big one was Teflon. 3M develops these chemicals and DuPont takes it over. And so for decades we're being told, hey, look at this great non-stick pan. This is wonderful. Everything is great. And then they're dumping off all of these PFAS chemicals into the Ohio River Valley. We're talking about entire towns just poisoned with these toxins.

Correct.

So those were the first cases with huge, huge results there for everybody. And now we're starting to see it in the military bases. We're seeing it with the firefighting foam. We're seeing it in the water supply. This has now just branched out and ballooned into all of these avenues where PFAS are flowing.

Yes. And to your point, they've always made products with PFAS in them, and they're always miracle products. To their credit, they do work well. I mean, a non-stick pan, it was hard to transition. But the latest product that we are going after and that resulted in the settlement is the firefighting foam as you were alluding to. But what is so bad about that product in particular is it's actually the perfect mechanism to spread PFAS everywhere. So the way these firefighters, airport workers and so on were trained to use it, is they were told you need to train with it daily to make sure it still works, which isn't true, so they could sell more foam and they were told to spray it just directly on the ground and leave it. And so if you're not familiar with this, it looks like a big foam blanket, like firefighters thought it was as safe as bubble bath. They were having graduation parties in it, like spraying foam around.

Oh my god.

Yeah. Because they thought it was safe, because that's what they were told. They would spray it on the ground, leave it soaks into the soil, soaks into the water table and so that's how it spreads everywhere from there.

And at this point, some of the studies that have come out absolutely shocking because we're looking at 98% of the population, not the population of this room, not the population of our state, 98% of human beings have traces of PFAS. You would have to travel to some remote country, to a group of people never contacted by the outside world. And even then you're probably still gonna find PFAS. That's how prevalent it is.

Exactly. And so you think when we talk to people about this case, they think, oh, well, if I live near a military base or if I live near an airport, that's the only time I would have to worry.