Melissa Furlong

So when the fire is over, you do your on-scene decontamination, you rinse, you soap,

on scene you take your gear off you put it in a gear bag you don't ever bring it into the cab and there are some other components of it but we're hoping that some of this research can basically help firefighters to protect themselves because we don't want firefighters to get sick we know that firefighters are at increased risk for cancer and we're trying to turn that around and we're also hoping that we can learn some things that will help the general population

Yeah.

Everyone should be concerned about their PFAS levels.

Individual people can take a few meaningful steps, but some people take it too far and it causes a lot of anxiety.

And they'll just constantly find new exposures for PFAS, right?

Or they'll read a new article about microplastics.

And it's the anxiety and the stress that can happen are not, they're not beneficial, right?

Those are also bad.

Yeah, exactly.

So mostly we want policymakers and manufacturers to be worried about the PFAS chemicals.

And they should be concerned about how they're going to help reduce PFAS exposure.

And then on an individual basis, there are a couple of recommendations.

Yes.

Yes.

So we found that water filtration and bottled water were associated with lower PFAS.

And then people who are on a well actually tended to have higher levels of PFAS.

Generally, I think a lot of people think that because they're on a well that it's pure water, it's perfect water, right?

Because it just like comes from the ground, but they don't realize that there's potentially a lot of groundwater contamination that might be happening from, you know, like the paper mill down the road.

And so you can test your water for some sort of common contaminants.