Melissa Furlong

We send it to a lab.

So my colleague, Jeff Burgess, who is actually the director of the Firefighter Cancer Cohort Study, and I, we put in an application to try to replicate the Australian study, but also extend it to look at health effects.

But when we enrolled all the firefighters, we measured their PFAS.

And we asked them all of these questions.

So we wanted to ask them at baseline if they had a history of plasma and blood donation along with all of these other occupational and lifestyle and behavioral characteristics.

And so that's what this paper is.

It's not the results of the trial, but it's basically a bunch of information that we got at the very beginning.

Mm-hmm.

while we wait to figure out if plasma donation reduces PFAS and has health benefits.

And one of the things that we see from the baseline is that people who reported a history of plasma donation had much lower levels of PFAS than people who did not report a history of plasma donation.

People who donated blood also had lower levels, not as low as the plasma people, but still slightly lower levels.

And so that is consistent with what the Australian study saw.

And we're hoping that that's what we see at the end of the study.

Yeah.

So we're hoping that larger organizations, larger firefighter organizations can take the body of literature, not just from this paper, but that we generate across all of our studies and that others who do firefighter research can generate to come up with

best practices and recommendations.

And so there's an initiative called the Clean Cab Initiative that has already been rolled out across a lot of departments.

It's not universally adopted across the United States.

We hope it will be.

And some of the things they encourage is basically, you know, you leave the fire at the scene.