Teflon is best known for making pans similar to this one "non-stick." But in Teflon's production at an Ohio plant, some of the chemical's ingredients have seeped into the groundwater. (Photo by Davide Guglielmo)
The non-stick substance Teflon is made at a DuPont plant near the Ohio-West Virginia border. The groundwater around this area has been contaminated by a chemical used to make Teflon. The chemical is known as C8. Now, 60,000 residents will be tested to find out whether the chemical is harmful to human health. It could end up being the largest public health screening to occur in the United States. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Fred Kight reports:
Transcript
The non-stick substance Teflon is made at a DuPont plant near the Ohio-West Virginia border. The groundwater around this area has been contaminated by a chemical used to make Teflon. The chemical is known as C8. Now, sixty thousand residents will be tested to find out whether the chemical is harmful to human health. It could end up being the largest public health screening to occur in the United States. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Fred Kight reports:
The testing is just getting underway on people who have been drinking water contaminated by C8.
It’s being done as part of the settlement of a class-action lawsuit against the company.
Residents of nearby water districts accuse the company of witholding information about the health threats posed by C8. Project coordinator Art Maher says medical histories, personal information and blood samples will be collected from the test subjects, who will be paid for their participation.
“That information then will be fed into a database that ultimately will be passed on to the next step of the settlement agreement, which would be the science panel who would interpret the data.”
If the experts determine there is a link between C8 and any disease, DuPont will be required to spend as much as 235 million dollars on a medical monitoring program for additional testing.
For the GLRC, this is Fred Kight.