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Teflon Chemical Causes Cancer In Trout and Why I Care.


Published August 5, 2008

A couple of years ago DuPont and other perfluorochemical industries were dismissing evidence of PFOA-caused cancer in rats, saying it was due to peroxisome proliferation in rats, which some argue isn't relevant to humans. However, PFOA may have other mechanisms of action (disrupting thyroid hormones, gap junctions, and estradiol among them). You can read more about the evidence in this EWG submission to the EPA. Well, EPA must not have payed too much attention to those other mechanisms because they basically ignored them and wanted to discount the cancer. In fact, they didn't do a cancer risk assessment at all. The EPA's draft risk assessment isn't very good but it does contain most of the background info if you're interested. ...