Ian Wright

And I've particularly looked at PFAS in water.

It's one of the major pathways into people and also into wildlife, coming through waterways, drinking water or water used in food and then moving into food.

But it is dangerous at incredibly low concentrations.

And when I say incredibly low, like a drop of PFAS in about five Olympic swimming pools, that's dangerous if you drink it.

It's actually really hard for the chemical industry or the analytical chemistry industry to even detect it.

But it builds up and it builds up particularly in our liver and the liver of animals.

We've studied it in platypus and it can build up into enormously high concentrations.

It's found in polar bears.

So it can move up in the food chain.

It's a very long list, Chris.

There's a whole series of cancers, higher blood pressure, changes to the immune system, heart disease.

There's a very long list.

And essentially, we're still living in an experiment.

And the literature is emerging every week and every month.

There's more case histories of what people with high PFAS concentrations, what health effects they suffer.

But for me, I realised this was a major problem when a Victorian firefighter called Mick Tisbury, now a commissioner in Victoria...

heard about a cancer cluster at the Fiskville training facility in Victoria.

And firefighters, the first responders, train with a type of foam that was built on PFAS, which would help control particularly fuel fires.

And they noticed that more and more firefighters were getting sick and sadly a lot were dying.

And PFAS has been implicated as one of the contributors to that.