Melissa Furlong

So PFAS stands for per and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

There are, at last count, over 10,000 different individual types of PFAS.

They started to become widespread in industrial use sometime, I think, in the 1940s.

Applications that basically need to repel both oil and water.

So like if you've got some stain-resistant furniture or stain-resistant carpet, there's a good chance it was treated with PFAS.

And in you.

If you are cooking with a nonstick Teflon pan, right, it's not like all of it is sticking to the pan.

Some of the PFAS is coming off onto the food, and then you're exposed that way.

If the PFAS has been applied to your carpet or if it's been applied to your furniture, then all of that sort of sheds into your environment.

Instead of being excreted like normal environmental toxicants would be, they just get recirculated by the body.

Almost everybody has detectable levels of at least one or two of the different common PFAS species.

Exposure is fairly constant, it's everywhere, and it also appears to be pretty toxic.

Okay, so that's actually a really hard question.

We're not 100% sure where the PFAS are coming from.

So there are some things that we suspect firefighters might have increased exposure to.

So PFAS is intentionally added to firefighter gear because it has oil repelling, water repelling, and heat repelling properties, right?

So it's a very good protection for firefighters as they're entering the fire station.

However, there's a possibility and many people have hypothesized that firefighters might be experiencing increased PFAS exposure directly from their gear.

So the gear that's supposed to be protecting them, is it actually increasing their PFAS?

And then the other source is that PFAS used to be an essential component of a certain type of firefighting foam that was pretty commonly used.