Maryland, My Maryland

ABC 47, MD bill could help eliminate PFAS out of the environment “Strong support, it unanimously passed:”

Knocking PFAS Chemicals out of the environment, a health and safety Maryland bill is moving forward to help this come to light.

“Strong support, it unanimously passed the Senate it’s now I believe moving through the House side,” Senator Mary Beth Carozza said.

It’s called the George Walter Taylor Act named after a firefighter who died from cancer linked to PFAS exposure.

"Linked to" is not the same as "caused by." Essentially all fire fighters have been exposed to PFAs at higher levels than the majority of us. That does not mean that every cancer, even every cancer of types "that can be tied" to PFAs in firemen are caused by PFAS. In the absence of PFAS they would likely suffer the same rate of those cancers as the population as a whole.

“It just goes to show when you learn that something like this toxic chemical can have this type of detrimental effect on our firefighters that you work through it and we ended up passing this ban,” Sen. Carozza said.

The bill would protect Marylander’s from toxic PFAS chemicals by banning the use of fire fighting foam laced with them, as well as carpets and food packaging.

“As far as the packaging, that is a huge issue certainly some companies are starting to make their changes already on their own, for instance McDonald’s is,” Cindy Dillon, the Chair of the Lower Eastern Shore Group of the MD Sierra Club, said.

Health experts warn that these chemicals are everywhere, and if they get in your body, they are there forever impacting us in many ways.

As such, and essentially indestructible in the environment, the law can't possibly eliminate PFAS in the evironment, it can only prevent more from being used, and lowering people's exposure to it.

“The biggest ones that everyone thinks of are the cancers that are related to it, I mean there’s a myriad of cancers that can be tied back to it, but also like pregnant woman can have hypertension, low birth weight,” Christopher Truitt, Assistant Chief of EMS at the Salisbury Fire Department, said.

Truitt said the news on banning fire fighting foam is great, especially because their job of taking on those fires is already a dangerous one.

“We use it for any kind of liquid type fires, so gasoline fires, petroleum based fires, things of that nature, and fortunately we don’t run into that a lot,” Truitt said.

But, while we don’t know if this bill will make it to the Governor’s desk yet, some advocates we spoke with are hopeful.

“That’s a huge problem that its already in our environment, but if they we can stop it being introduced continuing to pour into our environment that would be a step in the right direction,” Dillon said.

Christopher Truitt said currently there’s no body on the market that sells PFAS free fire fighting gear. So, they’ll need to look at where they will get gear and equipment from and then they will need to evaluate costs.

I confess to being unconvinced by the evidence for the toxicity of PFAS. I think this might be an example of the The Decline Effect – Part 2:  How Does This Happen?

What exactly is the decline effect? Is it the fact that certain scientifically discovered effects decline over time the more they are studied and researched? Almost, but not really. The Wiki has this definition for us:

“The decline effect may occur when scientific claims receive decreasing support over time. The term was first described by parapsychologist Joseph Banks Rhine in the 1930s to describe the disappearing of extrasensory perception (ESP) of psychic experiments conducted by Rhine over the course of study or time. In its more general term, Cronbach, in his review article of science “Beyond the two disciplines of scientific psychology” [ also .pdf here ] referred to the phenomenon as “generalizations decay.”  The term was once again used in a 2010 article by Jonah Lehrer published in The New Yorker.”

Some hold that the decline effect is not just a decrease of support over time but rather that it refers to a decrease in effect size over time – or, according to some, both because of one or the other. That is, the support decreases because the effect sizes found decrease, or, because of decreasing support, reported effect sizes decrease. The oft cited cause of the decline effect are: publication bias, citation bias, methodological bias, and investigator effects. Part 1 of this series was an example of investigator effects.