EWG and Environmental Defence Canada comment that the Canadian government’s Draft Screening Assessment for perfluorooctanoic acid ignores at least 12 key human and laboratory studies. Evidence suggests much greater risks to human health than determined by Canadian officials.

Oakland, Calif. – The chemical industry’s agreement with the federal Food and Drug Administration to phase out toxic perfluorinated compounds used to grease-proof pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags, fast food wrapping and other food packaging does not go far enough to protect public health.

My public health ethics class began with the intense, young professor asking a simple question: What do you value the most?

Laboratory tests commissioned by EWG have detected as many as 232 toxic chemicals in cord blood samples collected from 10 minority newborns. Notably these tests show, for the first time, bisphenol A (BPA), a plastic component and synthetic estrogen, in umbilical cord blood of American infants.

EWG comments that the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry draft toxicological profile for perfluoroalkyl compounds lacks risk-based values despite abundant data that the chemical family is toxic to people.

A March 10 agreement between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. over drinking water contamination around the company’s Parkersburg, WV, plant leaves people in the area exposed to dangerous levels of the Teflon chemical perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a probable carcinogen and reproductive system toxin also known as C8.

A major new study published yesterday in Human Reproduction, a European reproductive medicine journal, has found that pregnant women and women of child-bearing age in the United States are at greater risk than previously thought for infertility and reproductive problems as result of exposure to the toxic Teflon chemical PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid).

A chemical used to make Teflon, food wrappers and dozens of other consumer products is linked to higher levels of cholesterol, according to the latest findings of a multi-year study of 69,000 West Virginians and Ohioans whose drinking water was contaminated by a DuPont manufacturing plant in Washington, W.Va, along the Ohio River.

In 2006, under pressure from the U.S. EPA, DuPont and 7 other companies promised to phase out by 2015 a cancer-causing chemical called PFOA, used to make Teflon and also found in grease-resistant coatings for food packaging. In its place, the chemical industry is pushing new, supposedly “green” food package coatings. But an investigation by EWG finds no evidence that the industry-touted replacement chemicals being rushed to market are safer -- and plenty of evidence that DuPont and other manufacturers are continuing a decades-long pattern of deception about the health risks of PFOA and related chemicals.