Consumer Products

A routine-seeming government meeting marks the public debut of what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says is one of the most sweeping regulatory inquiries it has ever mounted on an industrial chemical. The chemical happens to be the key manufacturing aid for what is unquestionably DuPont’s marquee product brand, Teflon. DuPont officials have put the best possible face on this exceedingly rare EPA inquiry into the Teflon chemical, known as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), ever since the agency announced the effort in April 2003. EPA launched the investigation citing concerns about the substance’s toxicity, its extraordinary persistence in the environment, and the fact that it has turned up in the blood of almost everyone in the U.S. — especially children. Neither government nor DuPont scientists can explain why.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today released a preliminary assessment of the health risks from a Teflon-related chemical while saying it would further probe routes of human exposure to the chemical on an expedited basis.