In 1997 our expert witness in the PFAS rulemaking, Kris Hansen, was hired by 3M and tasked by her supervisor to look for PFOS (one type of PFAS) in blood samples. She found it in blood from workers, in random samples purchased from American Red Cross suppliers, in human blood from Europe and China, in rats, in horses, in cows, in eagles, in pigs. Everywhere she looked, she found PFOS in the bloodstream. The only samples that were PFOS free were collected before 3M started selling the chemical in the 1950's.
But what 3M did not tell Kris was that the company already knew that PFOS was toxic - tests in 1979 had caused death in lab rats, and liver abnormalities had been found in 3M workers. Those reports were marked confidential and kept secret, and Ms. Hansen was told directly that PFOS was non-toxic and shown to be harmless to 3M workers. They told the EPA the same thing.
Instead of reacting with appropriate alarm about the finding that their toxic chemical product was migrating into the bodies of people and animals around the world, company executives questioned why Ms. Hansen was conducting these tests and reassigned her and members of her team to other areas of research.
Under pressure from the EPA they did act in 2000 to remove PFOS from their products, all the while maintaining that it was harmless. But they soon replaced that product with PFBS, another PFAS, and even as independent research began to emerge linking PFAS with cancer, developmental, immune system and liver problems, they continued to mass produce and sell PFAS, now a chemical class covering more than 15,000 compounds, to industries around the world.
Eventually their secret would unspool, revealing contamination and harm to living organisms all over the world. After relentless pressure, the EPA finally acted in 2024 to declare PFOS and PFOA hazardous substances and set standards for six PFAS in drinking water, but 3M continues to produce other PFAS, and the company and its scientists have not admitted wrongdoing or faced criminal liability for concealing their harms.
The lesson to be learned by this sadly unsurprising story? Without a requirement of 100% transparency and strict regulatory oversight, the public cannot be protected from harms caused by corporate greed. The Oil Conservation Commission must require the oil and gas industry to disclose any and all chemicals used in fracking operations in New Mexico. Allowing corporations to hide behind proprietary trade secrets has consequences that expose all of us, our children, even our grandchildren, to enormous suffering and harm.
A physician quoted in the article above suspects that anyone exposed to PFAS has an elevated risk of cancer because their impacts on the immune system can interfere with the ability to seek and destroy tumors. Indeed, as we noted in a previous email, the Lancet recently published a report by researchers from the American Cancer Society who found that cancer rates for 17 of the 34 most common cancers are increasing in progressively younger generations. The study notes:
“Trends in cancer incidence in young generations or young adults (less than 50 years) largely reflect increased exposure to carcinogenic factors during early life or young adulthood compared with previous generations…”
In Ms. Hansen's expert testimony, filed on Monday, she emphasized that "Chemical disclosure is needed to verify compliance with the PFAS ban and to provide information necessary for risk assessments and monitoring by regulators, public health professionals, and the public." She knows personally how "trade secrets" are used to keep the public in the dark. She was kept in the dark by company executives for more than twenty years.
ON MONDAY WE JOINED WILDEARTH GUARDIANS, DEFEND NM WATER, PHYSICIANS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND YUCCA AT THE ROUNDHOUSE TO DELIVER 4700 PETITION SIGNATURES TO THE GOVERNOR AND DEMAND TRANSPARENCY AND PROTECTION FROM FURTHER PFAS CONTAMINATION BY THE OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY
Now we need you, the public, to SPEAK UP and demand that the Oil Conservation Commission end the oil and gas industry's trade secret protections so that company executives can be held accountable for any and all substances injected into New Mexico lands and aquifers. Without that transparency we are all at risk.