Commentary
I’ve always been of the firm opinion that the main cause of the global fertility crisis, apart from obesity and sedentary lifestyles, is our unprecedented exposure to harmful industrial chemicals, especially chemicals that disrupt our natural hormonal balance (so-called endocrine disruptors). Many of these chemicals are involved in the manufacture of plastics and personal-care products. The crisis is now so bad that man could be unable, as a species, to reproduce by natural means as early as 2045.
Although some believe that there’s a deliberate plan for population reduction at work—and often point to the undeniable fact that, over the past hundred years, many of the world’s scientific, commercial, and political elite have openly advocated adding sterilants to the food and water—this crisis seemed to me to be totally accidental. With our
lax approach to the licensing of new chemicals, it’s no wonder we’ve taken decades to find out that many chemicals that we thought were safe aren’t, by which point our environment has become totally saturated with them, and there now exist huge commercial incentives that work against removing them. It’s just a sad fact of life today. The product of short-sightedness, even hubris—but nothing worse than that.
Now, however, I’m not so sure. A couple of months ago, it was revealed that DuPont and 3M, two of the main producers of a class of chemicals known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), allegedly
suppressed information for 30 years to ensure that regulators and the public were unaware of the terrible threat these chemicals posed to living creatures, including humans. As we now know, PFAS are
endocrine disruptors with links to a host of conditions from obesity and auto-immune diseases to cancer, but their toxicity wasn’t established by scientists until the 1990s, long after DuPont and 3M knew of the dangers, according to their
own internal documents. It gets worse. Not only did the two companies know about many of these dangers, but they also allegedly actively worked to cover them up, misleading their own workers, regulators, and the general public that they had absolutely nothing to worry about.
PFAS were developed in the 1940s, and less than 20 years later, DuPont and 3M were both confronting serious questions about their safety. In 1961, it was reported that workers fell ill after smoking cigarettes contaminated with Teflon, a PFAS product, and an account emerged of a worker on a U.S. Air Force base who allegedly smoked a contaminated cigarette and died. In the years and decades that followed, animal studies commissioned by DuPont showed that one particular PFAS compound was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested” and also that dogs
exposed to a single dose of another compound died within two days.
But DuPont and 3M chose to not raise concerns with regulators or their employees, even when, in the early 1980s, there were reports of birth defects among female workers making PFAS. If the companies had anything to say about PFAS, it was that they were no more toxic than “table salt.” Reports of groundwater contamination near a DuPont PFAS factory were dismissed out of hand.
“C-8 [a PFAS compound] has no known toxic or ill health effects in humans at concentration levels detected,” a
DuPont statement reads.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s,
lawsuits were being brought against manufacturers, exposing some of DuPont’s internal documents. The fallout was that DuPont was hit with the largest civil penalty paid under environmental statutes at that time, $16.5 million, for failing to disclose its internal findings about PFOA [a type of PFAS]. Yet in 2006, DuPont was still bold enough to
petition the Environmental Protection Agency and ask it to issue an immediate statement that “consumer products sold under the Teflon brand are safe ... [and] to date there are no human health effects known to be caused by PFOA.”
A deluge of lawsuits has brought international attention to PFAS and their negative effects, with 3M’s current liability estimated at a whopping
$140 billion. Other welcome publicity has been provided by the recent Tucker Carlson documentary “
The End of Men” and professor Shanna Swan’s book “
Count Down,” which both focus on the global fertility crisis and link it to exposure to PFAS, as well as other chemicals such as BPA and phthalates.
Ms. Swan, a world expert on the subject, is responsible for the apocalyptic prediction I mentioned in the first paragraph. She arrived at it simply by extrapolating current trends in sperm counts. By 2045, the trends suggest, the median man will have a sperm count of zero: half of all men will produce no sperm at all, and the other half will produce so few that they might as well produce none. This is often referred to as a “spermageddon” scenario.
It’s worth noting that, although the effects of PFAS on male fertility have been grabbing most of the headlines, these chemicals also affect women’s reproductive health in ways that are no less terrible.
A recent study suggested that women exposed to PFAS are up to 40 percent less likely to conceive and bring a live baby to full term.
PFAS are also known to cause weight gain and are linked to conditions including heart disease, gut dysfunction, immune disorders, and cancers.
PFAS have an enormous variety of applications, from plastics, fire retardants, and greaseproof coatings to contact lenses, artificial turfs, and ammunition. As a result, they’re everywhere. You’ll find them in Arctic snow, and you’ll also find them deep in the human body, including on the surface of microplastics, which we’re eating, drinking, and inhaling in ever-greater quantities.
What’s especially worrying about PFAS, apart from their effects, is their resilience. PFAS are referred to as “forever chemicals” because they’re highly stable and don’t really degrade. Instead, they persist and accumulate, in the environment and in living creatures. Quantities of PFAS multiply up the food chain, so larger animals, such as Arctic whales and polar bears or humans, end up with massive amounts in their bodies. A
recent study shows that freshwater fish caught in the United States can contain up to 280 times the level of PFAS found in commercially farmed fish. Eating just a single fish caught in a U.S. lake or river could provide the equivalent dose of PFAS from a year’s consumption of shop-bought fish.
With the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health of the nation has suddenly become a political issue in a way that’s largely without precedent in American history. Yes, there have been national health drives before—President Richard Nixon’s War on Cancer springs to mind—but we aren’t talking about just one disease anymore. Now it’s an entire way of life, a crippling trail of tears Americans walk from birth, through adulthood to old age and death. No nation has ever been as sick as America is today. The cost of obesity alone is estimated at
$190 billion per year, more than the gross domestic product of most countries.
Mr. Kennedy’s focus on health has already drawn a surprising response from Donald Trump, who announced his intention to start a presidential commission and investigate the “unexplained and alarming growth in the prevalence of chronic illnesses and health problems, especially in children.”
“We’ve seen a stunning rise in autism, auto-immune disorders, obesity, infertility, serious allergies, and respiratory challenges,”
Mr. Trump said in a video released on Rumble. “It is time to ask: What is going on?”
What seems to be going on is that Americans have been sickened for decades by corporations that knew full well what they were doing and tried to hide it so they could continue making huge amounts of money. Exposure to PFAS has blighted the health of Americans and will continue to for a long time to come, even if we can find a way to start removing it from our environment and from our bodies as soon as possible—no easy task.
The real question is whether the political will can be summoned to flip over the right rocks and confront what lies beneath them, however ugly it may be.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
