News Coverage
EPA Investigates Group's Charge Regarding PFOA
Published July 13, 2003
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is investigating an environmental group's charge that DuPont may have violated a federal law by withholding documents from the government concerning health risks associated with perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a chemical used in the manufacture of Teflon fluoropolymers.
"The agency is taking the allegations of reporting violations seriously and is in the process of examining the more than two decades of reporting activity for the chemical and related materials," says Charles Auer, director of EPA's office of pollution prevention and toxics, in a letter to Environmental Working Group (EWG) president Ken Cook.
DuPont vigorously denies it violated federal law and asserts that the EWG has misrepresented PFOA as a health hazard.
"There is no evidence or data that demonstrates PFOA causes adverse human health effects, including developmental or reproductive effects, in any segment of the human population," says Robert Rickard, director of the DuPont Haskell Laboratory for Health and Environmental Sciences.
DuPont uses ammonium per-fluorooctanoate (APFO), which converts to PFOA in solution, as a processing aid at its Teflon facility in Parkersburg, W.Va.
In April, the EWG petitioned the EPA to investigate DuPont for allegedly withholding a 22-year-old study that detected PFOA in the umbilical cord blood of an infant born to a company worker, and in the blood of another worker's baby.
The group cited an internal "personal and confidential" DuPont document containing information on PFOA blood levels in eight female employees at the company's Parkersburg facility in 1981.
The EWG says the information became public last year as the result of a class action lawsuit brought by 3,000 West Virginians who live near the DuPont plant. They claim that PFOA from the facility contaminates local tap water and threatens health.
"The study documentation shows that two of seven women gave birth to babies with birth de-fects...That same year, DuPont reassigned 50 women at the plant to reduce PFOA exposure," the EWG said in its petition. "We have thoroughly re-viewed 8(e) submissions from DuPont regarding PFOA, and find no record of this study in the agency's files."
Section 8(e) of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) requires the im-mediate reporting of information which "reasonably supports the conclusion" that a given substance or mixture "presents a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment."
In a letter to DuPont, Richard Hefter, chief of the EPA's high production volume chemicals branch, asks the company to provide "the contemporaneous logic for DuPont's decisions not to submit to the EPA under TSCA section 8(e) the reports of PFOA blood monitoring data on female workers and their offspring and human developmental ef-fects in 1981 and subsequently as additional data on PFOA's hazards and exposure...were accumulated."
Mr. Hefter says the EPA is concerned that the blood and umbilical cord monitoring data, together with the known or suspected toxicity of PFOA and other exposure data, "may present a TSCA 8(e) reporting obligation."
"We suspect, but cannot prove at this point, that DuPont has been deliberately withholding this information to avoid EPA action again PFOA and its highly profitable Teflon product line," says Jane Houlihan, EWG vice president of research.
But in a letter to the EPA, DuPont corporate counsel Andrea Malinowski says the one-page 1981 document did not trigger reporting obligations under TSCA 8(e) because the information it contains "does not in any way even suggest that PFOA is the cause of any adverse effect."
The document, she explains, is an "informal collection of information" recording the presence of low levels of PFOA in eight blood samples taken from female employees who worked in or near the Parkersburg plant in the early 1980s.
The information was not part of any study evaluating employee exposure or human health effects related to PFOA, according to Ms. Malinowski. While one confirmed birth defect was recorded, she says there is no indication that it was caused by exposure to PFOA.
In March 1981, the 3M Company-the manufacturer of APFO and DuPont's supplier-provided DuPont with the results of a preliminary study indicating that PFOA may cause birth defects in laboratory animals.
As a precaution, Ms. Malinowski says DuPont temporarily reassigned about 50 women of childbearing age from the fluoropolymers unit to other locations where exposure to the chemical would be lower.
She says further testing by DuPont and 3M showed no birth defects were observed and it was concluded that the original study was not valid and that PFOA did not cause birth defects. Women were allowed to return to the fluoropolymer area in March 1982.
At the time of the initial report from 3M, DuPont offered blood testing for PFOA to employees at the Parkersburg, plant. "Those who volunteered included eight women who worked at the plant and who either were pregnant or had given birth recently," says Ms. Malinowski.