Melissa Furlong

Ever since they figured out that maybe PFAS isn't that great for you,

they started to phase PFAS out of those foams.

They're still in some foams, but they're used a lot less.

And we do actually see that firefighters who have a history of using these types of foams have higher levels of PFAS.

So we do think that the foams themselves were probably a significant contributor to the PFAS.

So there are several different potential sources where firefighters could be exposed to

And the only one, the only occupational one where we're pretty sure is a source are the foams.

Yeah, so it's really hard.

Ideally, you'd like to be able to follow the firefighters around to all the fires and have a, you know, standardized process.

behavioral recorder who records everything.

But that's just not possible because we have, there's about 8,000 firefighters in our study.

And so we rely for the most part on self-report.

So we have a fairly extensive survey.

We ask the firefighters to fill it out.

When they enroll in the survey, we ask them to fill out an annual update.

And then sometimes at like

high exposure events will come back and get new samples and ask them to fill out more surveys.

We also ask department liaisons to fill out surveys about how their stations are structured or whether they provide their firefighters with certain types of access to different hygiene equipment.

And then for the PFAS, we just measure it in their blood.

Got it.