[Music] [Cecilia] hello everyone good afternoon and
thank you for joining us we are starting the top of the hour so I want to welcome you to
the NNLM social determinants of environmental health webinar series we glad you're able
to join us today for this session on PFAS and environmental health information and
tools for public health practitioners and information specialists I'm your host
Cecilia Vernes my pronouns are she her and I'm the education coordinator for the NNLM
national public
health coordination office assisting me today with technical aspects
for today's session is the NNLM National Training office and our chat monitors are
Javier Crespo Justin De La Cruz and Carolyn Martin we just have a few technical items
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ho we are
the National Institutes of Health is a nation's leading medical research agency
many of you might be more familiar with the National Cancer Institute which is one
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rt of the network visit our website
at nnlm.nih.gov and see the link posted in the chat so on today's presentation I very
pleased to welcome our two presenters Julia Varshavsky is an assistant professor
of Environmental Health at Northeastern University and also has a joint appointment in
the Department of Health Sciences Bouvé College of Health Sciences and the Department of Civil and
environmental engineering College of Engineering specifically her recent work highlights Maternal
Fetal e
xposure to toxicants during mid-gestation in relation to biomarkers of placental development
and disease that are associated with maternal and Fetal Health complications Julia earned her mph
and PhD in Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California Berkeley School
of Public Health her dissertation research focused on developing methods for characterizing
disparities in and evaluating dietary sources of cumulative exposure prior to graduate school
Julia facilitated scientific
dialogue and research translation around developmental impacts
of environmental contaminants as the reproductive Health working group coordinator for
the collaborative on health and the environment Julia studied molecular biology as
an undergraduate and contributed to laboratory research that improve chemical screening
methods in water through microarray development Alissa Cordner is associate professor
associate sociology and the Paul Garrett fellow At Whitman College she teaches
courses
in sociology Environmental Studies Alyssa's research focuses on
environmental sociology the sociology of risk and disasters Environmental Health and
Justice and politics and participation her two major areas of research are the social and
political aspects of wildfire risk management and the social and scientific discoveries of
perfluorinated chemicals she has published articles in numerous journals as well
as written and collaborated on books on environmental health and sociology
topics A
lissa Cordner is also the co-director of the PFAS project lab PFAS
are per and poly fluorinated substances with researchers at Northeastern University the
lab focuses on social and scientific questions related to perfluorinated chemicals Alyssa grew
up in Oregon's Willamette Valley she attended Bowdoin college and majored in sociology and
French she joined the faculty At Whitman in 2013 and in addition to her academic research is
a volunteer wild wildland firefighter with Walla Walla County
Fire District Number Four the title
their presentation is what health practitioners and information Specialists need to know welcome
Melissa and Julia I'll turn it over to you [Alissa] excellent well yes thank you again for
having us we're very excited to share a little bit about our research with a general focus
on information about environmental health that will be use to our audience today and a focus on
PFAS the group of chemicals that we both study the PFAS project lab is an interdisc
iplinary
research group at Northeastern University and we both produce original research and we also
do a lot of work to translate and transform existing data into products that are useful to
a broad a broad array of publics in particular a focus on communities that are highly impacted
by PFAS and what we'll do today is talk a little bit about environmental health generally with
a focus on toxic chemicals or toxicants then we'll dive into PFAS as our case study with
a little bit of an over
view on this group of chemicals we'll and then we'll talk about three
particular databases that might be useful or interesting to our audience today and we'll
finish up with some resources and hopefully plenty of time for question and answer and maybe
even playing around with some of those databases and as as Cecilia mentioned I an environmental
sociologist my research focuses on the very broad question of how we make decisions in the
face of uncertainty decisions about what we do decision
s about what we should do and in the
case of environmental issues this uncertainty is ubiquitous it involves all scales of action
from Individual level experiences all the way up to what happens at an international scale
and it involves both Behavior and also Norms or expectations if you want to click through a
couple of images Julia I previously worked on flame retardant chemicals and published that
in a book called toxic safety I also work as was mentioned on Wildland fire with a focus on
how policies designed to protect firefighters and protect the public and protect resources how
those policies develop and change and with what consequences and then today of course I'll be
talking about my work with the PFAS project lab [Julia] great thank you and so
hi everyone I'm Julia Varshavsky I'm an environmental health scientist and an
environmental epidemiologist which basically means that I have interdisciplinary expertise in
exposure assessment environmental toxicology and envi
ronmental epidemiology and I also am very
passionate about and committed to translating science and translating my research into action
so my main focus is on environmental exposures and how they relate to maternal and child
health effects across the life course so what I do is I look at exposure sources and how those
relate to chemical levels in the body how those chemical levels in the body impact or perturb
biological Pathways and like placental disruption or endocrine disruption oxidati
ve stress and
inflammation then how those perturbation relate to clinical or subclinical outcomes Maternal
Child Health outcomes including pregnancy outcomes cognitive and behavioral outcomes
growth and Metabolism or outcomes related to cardio and metabolic function and then again
I'm very committed to translating research along that along all or aspects of that research into
action all right so I think at this point we're going to we've been asked to remove the video
I'm going to do that
now and we are going to begin so I'm going to provide a brief overview of
environmental health and environmental toxicants and so Environmental Health in a nutshell is
basically how the environment impacts human health rather than the other way around and the
environment can mean a lot of different things because we are exposed to many different chemical
and non-chemical stressors throughout our daily lives and that's true from the air we breathe
the water we drink the food we eat the produ
cts we use and the social context in which we live
it can also include things like where we work or where we're from our genetic traits and perhaps
also even what environmental and social stressors our parents and Grandparents were exposed to
so so these factors are all interconnected and they can each affect our susceptibility or
vulnerability to disease across our lifetimes as well as our resilience in the face of cumulative
exposures and their potential Health implications the reason why
I'm highlighting here a picture
of a pregnant person is because pregnancy is really considered a a a critical or perhaps the
most critical period of development for both the fetus and the pregnant individual so exposures
during this time can really influence maternal and child health outcomes across the entire
life course and even though the environment can mean a lot of different things much of the
focus of environmental health has really been on chemical exposures and that has a lot to d
o
with the fact that since World War II and over the past few decades chemical production has
really increased dramatically this is data from the US Federal Reserve board showing a 23.5 fold
increase in chemical production between 1945 and 2007 and that has a lot to do with the Industrial
Revolution and the increase in the production of synthetic materials since World War II which
has really been instrumental to modern-day living but in consequence there are now more
than 80,000 synthetic
chemicals on the market many of which are commonly used in everyday
household products including food products food packaging materials flooring and building
materials things like shower curtains medical equipment baby products and even children's
toys and we have limited or no toxicity data on most of those chemicals most of the chemicals
in US Commerce and that's really because of the way US chemicals policy works there's really
no requirement for toxicity testing prior to releasing chemi
cals in US Commerce however there
are some high production volume chemicals that have gotten a lot of attention in recent years
because of their widespread use and potential to impact human health some chemicals that you
may have heard of more recently include things like Phthalates which are often used to soften
plastic they're found in food contact materials and personal care products like fragrances
and nail polish phenols like bisphenol a or BPA and it's replacements which have been use
d
in the lining of canned foods thermal receipts and harder polycarbonate water bottles flame
retardant like polybrominated dienol ethers or OPFRs heavy metals like lead and mercury and then
we have per- and poly-fluorinated alkyl substances or PFAS again and we're going to be going
into more detail about that during this talk but they're typically used for their
stain and water resistant properties and so as a result of all this widespread use of
these chemicals they are unsurprisingly fo
und ubiquitously in our bodies biomonitoring
studies of the US population have shown us that the majority of people including
pregnant individuals as you can see in this graph have measurable levels of various
synthetic chemicals in their bodies including phthalates including flame retardants and PFAS
although that's not included in this graph and others
and that is why as the National Cancer Institute recently put it babies are now
effectively born pre-polluted, with body burden levels of
many of these synthetic chemicals in
their bodies at Birth and and we're concerned about that because many of these chemicals are
biologically active compounds that can interfere with the molecular signaling that governs human
life and biology and we're especially vulnerable to the effects of these compounds during periods
of extreme biological or developmental change such as in utero during puberty and during
pregnancy so just like with pregnant individual and developing fetuses babies and
children are
more sensitive to chemical exposures when their bodies are actively developing and you can also
Imagine That biological changes while we age may also be sensitive to these compounds and
one type of biologically active compound are endocrine disrupting chemicals or EDCs
and these are chemicals that can interfere with the molecular signaling that orchestrates
human reproduction and human development and function and EDCs as a whole have been linked to
a wide range of health impa
cts across the life course from cancer to asthma to infertility
and neurodevelopmental problems and the US disease cost from edc's has recently been
estimated to be $340 billion dollars with PDBEs and phthalates cited as the leading
drivers of that burden and that's mainly due to their Early Childhood effects on
neurodevelopment in the case of PDBEs and fetal effects on reproductive development
in the case of phthalates and PFAS have also been recently implicated
in that burden for their i
mpacts on low birth weight and we've also seen rising trends concerning
trends over the last few decades in adverse reproductive health outcomes like reduced
sperm count and quality like increased testicular cancer and infertility and
these rising trends have really not been sufficiently explained by either increased
reporting genetics nutritional factors other lifestyle or behavioral factors that we
often attribute to disease which suggests there may be some environmental component
like
EDCs that really deserves further study and this is just an article that came out
a few years ago highlighting a systematic review and meta analysis of over a hundred
studies in several countries including the US which showed a more 50% decline
in sperm count over the last 40 years indicating the possibility that we are
less fertile than our grandparents were other concerning trends that haven't really been
sufficiently explained by those known factors like genetics lifestyle or increased d
iagnostics
include pregnancy complications with preclampsia increasing in younger pregnant individuals in the
United States increases in gestation diabetes and diabetes other cardiometabolic conditions like
obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease learning and developmental disabilities like
autism spectrum disorders are also on the rise as well as autoimmune disease and various cancers
so there's a lot of work that we can do to study and intervene on these modifiable environmental
ch
emical exposures and I will turn it now over to Dr Cordner to dive a little deep
deeper into PFAS as a case study [Alissa] great thank you Julia I will focus on
a very broad overview of PFAS a a case study of environmental health concern and we'll
go quickly through this just to allow time for the rest of the presentation but we're very
happy to answer PFAS specific questions during Q&A PFAS are a very large class of chemicals
and there's no universally approved or valid recognized definiti
on of what counts as a PFAS
due to complexities in their chemical structures but depending on how you define that chemical
class there could be over 14,000 this is from a definition used in one EPA US EPA database
so we're talking not just about a handful of chemicals but about many thousands of compounds
PFAS are a concern because of the combination of persistence bioaccumulation mobility and toxicity
so they're highly persistent in the environment and in the human body they're bioaccumula
tive in
wildlife in many different species also in people they're very Mobile in water which allows them to
be both a persistent and a a mobile contaminant of surface water and groundwater which ultimately
then impacts people's drinking water and water for many different species and as a result of
this we have really ubiquitous exposure to these chemicals over 99% of people have detectable
measure levels of PFAS in their blood and this is important because we don't have analytic
methods fo
r all 14,000 or more PFAS we have methods for a few dozen individual compounds
and so if we're talking about detecting even that small number of PFAS in nearly everyone's
bodies that should give us significant cause for concern we have such ubiquitous exposure
because these chemicals are very broadly used very widely used for their for their properties
if you want to go to the next slide Julia PFAS are used in countless consumer products and in
over 200 distinct use categories according to
one study you might be very familiar with these
uses things like non-stick cookware things like waterproof clothing or water resistant
clothing a water water resistant carpet or stain resistant carpet but any textile that
has a water or stain resistant quality odds are that quality was imparted with PFAS PFAS are also
very widely used in different industrial processes including things like metal plating they're used
as surfactants for mining and fracking operations they are used in all type
s of product production
uses and they were they are used in a particular type of firefighting foam Class B Foams which
are used to extinguish flammable fuel fires so think about an oil or gas fire you want to have
a a a firefighting foam that spreads out very effectively PFAS have really excellent surfactant
qualities that allow them to become very efficient additives to these firefighting Foams
if you want to go to the next slide so the combination of
the persistence and bioavailability of
these compounds their widespread use we add
to that many concerns about human health impacts according to Dr Linda Birnbaum who is the
retired director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
and the national toxicology program PFAS affect virtually every organ system and so
we're not talking about a single type of health effect we're talking about multiple types of
cancers impacts to many different systems within the body such as the liver the kidney reproductive
syste
ms there are associations between PFAS exposure and different reproductive outcomes and
Julia will talk a little bit more about how we're thinking about this with her database the
PFAS-TOX database if you want to go to the next slide and so how has Society responded there has been
a growth in public awareness in media attention of course in scientific attention and bringing
all those things together we've seen a lot of changes in the regulation of these chemicals
in the past decade or so and
so recently we've seen proposals at the federal level to list two
PFAS - PFOA PFOS under the Superfund Act we also see some proposals to add certain PFAS
to we have proposals underway to create regulatory drinking water levels for six PFAS
listed here those proposals came out last March and we're still waiting for the finalization
of those drinking water proposals but that would be very significant because at this point
there's no federally enforcable drinking water standard for any PFAS as
a result of this general
vacuum in Federal Regulation a number of states have enacted either enforceable or advisory
levels for PFAS and drinking water you see here a screenshot from one of the maps in our
PFAS sites and community resources map that we'll show you in a bit that looks the darker
blue states have regulatory levels for certain PFAS while the lighter blue states have some
sort of guidance or advisory level and then the states that are not shaded have no PFAS drinking
water gui
delines whatsoever so we've seen quite a range in PFAS regulatory approaches at the state
and federal level and this has been one of our research projects at the PFAS project lab
we'll talk more about that in a moment [Julia] great and so one way
that we are really trying to wrangle or systemize the data on PFAS to
help inform these efforts to understand and mitigate the harms of PFAS is through the
PFAS-TOX database so the PFAS-TOX database is a systematic evidence map of over 1,000 studie
s
on any and all health and toxicology outcomes related to PFAS it is an online searchable
database that is intended to be very user friendly it's been updated through January
2021 at this point and includes multiple evidence streams including human studies animal
studies and in vitro studies it's a joint project between myself and collaborators at other
institutions and was originally started by Katie Pelch and Carol Kwiatkowski at the former
nonprofit the Endocrine Disruption Exchange or
TEDX and Anna Reade at Natural Resources Defense
Council but it has since evolved and sort of found a new home in the PFAS Project Lab at Northeastern
University and I want to acknowledge Abigail Bline who is one of our postdocs at Northeastern who's
really been leading this work so you can link to the database at the URL at the bottom right of
the screen pfastoxdatabase.org and then if you click on the word database up at the top right
of the of that screen it takes you to this user frien
dly searchable interface and so here is where
you can search for human studies in green you see at the top right the green button you can search
for or versus animal studies in blue and in vitro studies in orange you can also search just under
that you can also search for early life effect where you see this baby face emoji where it says
also early life effects and then under that you can also search for author conflicts of interest
where it says financial conflict of interest and you can d
ownload abstracts and other study details
at the download study list button here at the bottom right and that gives you a really nice
Excel or CSV file with many different variables of interest that we extracted from each study and
one thing that's not on this sort of popup screen here is that the list of references in this box
on the right hand side of your screen all the list of references if you hover over any one of
those in a live session you'll a popup will pop up that shows the abstr
act and all these other
details that are extracted in that Excel and CSV file but individually for each study happy to do
a live demo during the Q&A if that's helpful but let's keep moving through this so you can get a
feel for it so on the very left hand side where the red circle is it says studies on 29 PFAS and
that's these are the list of studies or excuse me the list of PFAS that are currently included
in the database to the right of that is a column that says total that lists all the
total studies
for each compound so for PFNA you'll see 631 total studies in the database and the reason why it
only includes 29 PFAS at this point in phase one is because we decided to focus the first
phase of the database on the most the emerging and newer generation replacement PFAS that we
thought were most relevant for current decision making context but I will say that we have since
decided to add Legacy PFAS from Alissa's talk on PFOA and PFOS that are considered you know older
gener
ation Legacy PFAS but are highly persistent in the environment we've decided to add those and
that update should be available by the end of June of this year and so let's say just looking at
this we're going to do a little more on the next slide but just looking at this let's say I was
interested in all all studies on the endocrine system for PFNA this first PFAS here listed I
would go to the oh and that's what I forgot to say actually the top rows here the top columns
are the health outcom
e categories or groupings that we organized all the data into so you see
metabolic and digestive system and body weight size and growth and endocrine system on the left
and then all the way down to cancers on the right so let's say I was interested in all the studies
related to PFNA and endocrine system I can see just without even clicking on anything there
are 129 human studies 49 animal studies and 35 in vitro studies now let's say I'm interested in
a compound like GenX here's GenX down h
ere where it says 29 total studies and I can just see by
scrolling down this column here to the right I can just see that there are no human studies in this
database on GenX which is informative in and of itself so if I do a more specific search on
all human cancer studies I would click on the cancer endpoint up here and then I would click
on the human tab here and I get all the human studies for all the PFAS in the database so
you can see there's 14 for PFNA and so forth and you can alread
y see that just by doing that I
already get some kind of summary information down here at the bottom including some basic breakdown
data on study design on exposure type whether it be non-occupational or occupational on study
location and if you scroll down here you can see a little more but you also have the option
right to click this download study list button and when you click that this box pops up and asks
you what sort of format you wanted it there are multiple options including this
heat map but
other options above and I just want the study list themselves so I click on that and then I can
either decide on Excel or CSV and click download then I get this file that looks looks something
like this and includes this sort of information where you've got the authors the type of study
if you're doing more than one type abstract funding acknowledgement COI information the study
design the PFAS included sample size location and also you know information about how exposure and
o
utcome variables were measured which is really important for for determining bias and things
like that in in ecologic studies we we can go into more more about this during Q&A if people
are interested but I did want to just kind of run through some examples of how we're using the
database in our work so one way is we've been using the database to show that the number of
studies on PFAS in all three evidence streams has really gone up dramatically over the last 10
years and you can see in th
e graph on the top left that's especially true here for human studies
in green and so out of those human studies you can see here is a a graph of the PFAS that
are most often included in those studies and you can also see that in the graph on the bottom
right that body weight size growth reproductive endocrine and metabolic and digestive systems
are the most commonly examined health outcome groupings in those studies we also and it's not
shown here but we also were able to determine that mo
st human studies were cross-sectional
or cohort study designs so things like that have given us some really nice high level
information about PFAS research over the last few decades and one of our collaborators
at Silent Spring Institute Dr Laurel Schaider has also used the database to show that thus far
the vast majority of those studies are on long chain or or more like legacy older generation
PFAS versus the shorter chain newer generation PFAS we've also been using the database in our
w
ork to examine racial and ethnic demographics of epidemiologic study populations and if it's become
clear doing that work that white participants in blue are disproportionately represented
in epidemiologic PFAS studies in this case involving reproductive health outcomes compared
to bipoc participants and that most notably you know there were very few studies that included
Asian and or Pacific Islander study populations and no studies that explicitly included Native
American participants in
their study populations we're also using the database as a platform
from which to conduct rigorous systematic reviews on PFAS and various health outcomes of
interest we started with gestational diabetes and are applying elements of OHAT and UCSF's
navigation guide frameworks for conducting systematic reviews on environmental data and
metaanalysis on both clinical and subclinical measures of gestational diabetes that have been
examined in recent human observational studies and the protocol f
or this is currently under
review by the journal Environment International we're also using the database to determine if
human epi and experimental animal studies with a financial conflict of interest related to PFAS
production use report industry favorable versus industry unfavorable results more frequently
than studies without a financial COI and this is represented in the figure on the right but
there are 109 animal and 41 human studies which report conflicts of interest thus far in the
database that's 150 studies and which is about 9% and we are defining favorable this is
still a work in progress and we're still making these determinations but as of now
we're defining favorable as studies which either report no associations or effects or
downplay the importance of effects that are reported by say writing them off as you know due
to Method methodological flaws or something like that all right and we've also used the database
to conduct a comparative analysis of remediation
studies on PFAS in soil or water and aqueous
environments and that's really to better understand the techniques and the technologies
that are currently being developed and what the advantages and challenges of each are so that
we can better understand which are the most viable for actually scaling up from the lab to
real world application since we all know that the persistence of PFAS will remain a problem
long after we're able to reduce the source of exposure and I'll just end by giving s
ome context
for how others are using the database in their work we've heard from various stakeholders in
the field that the database has been and will continue to be useful in their work for example
supporting policy and advocacy efforts on PFAS and drinking water we've heard from various
toxicologists and risk assessors as well as environmental lawyers and community members
about that we've also heard about its utility in informing these high level decision-making type of
contexts in the R
egulatory and clinical settings it has been also linked to other databases of
interest and has provided content for hypothesis generation and things like preliminary literature
of reviews in the development of new research questions and things like that so we hope it will
also be useful for you as information specialists and public health practitioners and would love to
hear any feedback you might have and with that I will for now turn it over back to Alissa
[Alissa] thank you Julia I'm goin
g to talk about two
data sources that we have on the PFAS project website so the first is our
PFAS sites and community resources map this is an interactive map made through the ARCGIS
experience map program and the map itself you can there's a shortened link there and it
has several different layers including known contamination sites presumptive contamination
sites community resources which includes things like the location of community groups and then the
state action tab which includes i
nformation like which states have drinking water advisory levels
and so this map is a result of some work we've been doing since 2016 if you want to go to the
next slide Julia we started compiling a list of known contamination sites of known places around
the country where PFAS had been measured and do this just gives you a sense of how far PFAS
research has come in less than a decade when we started compiling this data in 2016 we
started our first round with only 12 known sites and these we
re sites that generally were
linked to Industry so for example the Washington Works plant or the Decatur Alabama large chemical
manufacturing facilities This was generally before the large data release from the third round of
the EPA's unregulated containment monitoring rule or UCMR which included several PFAS and gave
us the first kind of hint at how widespread PFAS contamination was in drinking water around
the country since then as you can see from this slide we have expanded the databas
e into almost
2,000 sites now this is not the the sites on this list are not every single place where PFAS
have been detected we do not include individual drinking water systems on our database all
the entries in our database are known contamination sites with a known source of PFAS
contamination this would include things like military facilities that had used fluorinated AFFF
or industrial facilities that had released PFAS into the environment fire training facilities
wastewater treatment pl
ants with measurable PFAS levels these are all known contamination sites
known places where PFAS have been measured and can be linked to a particular source and
this database is fully accessible online the shortened URL is here on the screen as well
and all this information is available as a sort of interactive Google sheet and we also do make
this data available to researchers who want to use it we have a user agreement that we share
with folks and if they are willing to read that and and
comply with it then we're happy to share
the actual underlying data as well so this data then feeds into our map that you saw on the
last slide and if you want to go to the next slide Julia this shows kind of an example of
what happens when you zoom into a particular location so I am in Walla Walla Washington on the
Eastern side of the state and there is a a known contamination site at the Fairchild Air Force
Base up near Spokane and so maybe folks have maybe maybe you might have seen a new
story like
I have here in the bottom left and you thought oh I wonder what's going on at this contamination
site you can look at the actual database which is shown at the top to see information about
this contamination site or you can zoom in on the map and that same information pops up in
a a sort of a popup box there so this is how the known contamination site and the map can
be useful to folks especially people who want to explore their community or other places
that they might care ab
out if you want to go to the next slide Julia we also have developed a
model of presumptive PFAS contamination and this is the idea that because PFAS testing around
the country and of course around the world has been very uneven we don't actually know all of
the locations that are contaminated with PFAS at the current time and so we compiled existing
research papers and regulatory documents that linked particular types of sites with known PFAS
contamination and this led us to identify three
types of sites that we called presumptive PFAS
contamination sites and this means that in the absence of high quality testing data we encourage
decision makers to treat these types of sites as presumptively contaminated until testing can be
done those include a AFFF discharge sites so the places where fluorinated firefighting Foams
have been used it also includes certain types of industrial facilities that either produced or
used PFAS and it includes sites related to PFAS containing waste
and this could be wastewater
treatment plants sludge application sites incinerators etc now in our research we were able
to gather high quality nationwide geolocation data for certain types of presumptive contamination
sites so for example we were able to gather geolocation data on large airports the part
139 airports around the country and so we're able to map those but there are other types
of presumptive contamination sites for which high quality geolocation data does not exist at
least
not at the nationwide scale and so to give another example from the AFFF category there's
no nationwide data set that shows all the places where firefighters have trained with AFFF or all
of the airplane crash sites around the country where AFFF has been used so what our presumptive
contamination model does is say here are the types of sites that we would argue should be presumed
to be contaminated in the absence of high quality testing data when we try to operationalize that
model and act
ually create mappable data we run up with a a huge undercount of those actual
facilities we did compile as much data as we were able to gather and ended up identifying over
57,000 presumptive sites around the country this was published in ES&T letters in 2022 the entire
data set is also publicly available and if you are interested interested in it we're happy to share
if you email us and if you go to the next slide Julia you can see here the difference between the
volume of known contaminat
ion sites and the volume of presumptive contamination sites you'll also
see real inequalities in terms of the distribution of testing so for example New Hampshire looks
like it is just sort of pool of PFAS floating over the entire state it's rather the case that
New Hampshire has systematically tested for PFAS and then tracked down contamination to a known
source of contamination and so this really does speak to us the necessity of this presumptive
PFAS contamination model because testing h
as been very uneven and so as I said both of these
data layers go into our PFAS sites and community resources map which is on the internet
and also these data sets are available to researchers who are interested in using
them or exploring the data so if you want to go to the next slide Julia another aspect of our
work with the PFAS project lab has been tracking the growth and development of regulation and
governance action around PFAS just as Julia mentioned there has been a huge increase i
n
scientific research on PFAS over the last maybe 10 years or so there's been a real really an
explosion of governance activity as well so if you want to go to the next slide we think about
PFAS governance as including many different types of activities coming from the government we
talk about legislation in terms of bills and laws regulatory activity these are things promulgated
by regulatory agencies in individual states or at the federal level those agencies can also
produce non-regulat
ory initiatives these might be voluntary programs or things like the drinking
water advisory levels that don't have regulatory teeth but still might be influential we also
talk about peri-governmental work in which the governing work is actually done outside of
the state but then can be incorporated into the state in meaningful ways so for example there
are independent standard setting organizations that develop fire safety standards that then get
incorporated into municipal codes in a regu
latory capacity governance happens at multiple scales
of course from the international scale all the way down to the local and there are many topics
of governance activities relevant in the PFAS world if you want to go to the next slide and so
starting in 2021 we began to compile a database of PFAS governance actions and we're grateful to
our funders and also grateful to the nonprofit organization Safer States for sharing some
useful data with us if you want to go to the next slide we compi
le this into a very non
user friendly database that quickly became much more complicated and difficult to work
with than we we knew we could release to the public and so this gives us gives you just a
little bit of a preview into what that looks like in our internal version if you go to
the next slide Julia starting in the summer of 2023 we worked with computer scientists
at Whitman College and created a publicly available interactive website so and this is
that governance.pfasproject.com
when you load the website you'll get this informational screen that
has information about the website how to use it information about how we compile the data and
also a discussion of limitations of this database as well as a form for submitting additional
suggestions or corrections to the database when you click out of it and it does take a
second to load because the website loads over 1,000 entries all at once so when you click
out of it if you go to the next slide Julia you'll be shown all
of the results and the
you'll see in that upper right hand corner I hope you can still hear me if you can't just
put a note in the I got a note that my internet is unstable so hopefully you can still hear me
in the on the right hand side there you'll see that I've circled the number of results this
shows you that at this point the website loads all over 1,000 entries in the governance database
and as you then filter the results on the on the leftand side that number in the right hand side
will decrease there are lots of different ways you can filter the data you can ask for just
Federal action or just State action you can ask for a specific Federal agency so you could ask
the website to show me show me everything that the Food and Drug Administration has done or you can
you can select particular states maybe you want to look at states in your region or maybe you care
a lot about states about one particular state you can select by state you can limit the date range
we have ent
ries going back to the 90s and then up till 2024 so you can limit the dates you can
choose the type of action this would be if is it a legislative action regulatory non-regulatory
or peri-governmental you can select particular topics we have over 35 topics in the database
ranging as the previous slide showed from things like air to fishing game cleanup requirements
data and data production requirements lots of different topics for legislation you can select
particular outcomes so you can as
k for only those legislation entries that were ultimately passed
and there's a couple different categories there because legislation can be passed and signed it
can be passed and fully vetoed it can be passed and partially vetoed there are a few different
options there and then you can also sort for example by date so those are all the ways that you
can kind of manipulate this database which again is at governance.pfasproject.com so that you can
find governance activities that are useful to
you and with that I will turn it back to Julia [Julia] great so we just wanted to provide
a few resources as we end here and get into the Q&A so the PFAS Project Lab resources
that we've shared with you there's the PFAS the general pfasproject.com website that
gives a lot of more information the PFAS-TOX database specifically again can be found
at pfastoxdatabase.org PFAS contamination tracker the link for that is here as well
as the governance tracker that Alissa just mentioned and just r
eminders about what those
entail here that you can look back on we also wanted to provide a few other resources that
we thought might be helpful in general the pfas-exchange.org website includes alot
of resources and fact sheets related to PFAS Silent Spring Institute is an important
research organization in this work and same with the Collaborative for Health and Environment
or CHE and the Green Science Policy Institute and then the NASEM guidance on PFAS testing and
health outcomes the c
linical guidance that recently came out on PFAS is a wonderful
resource that we also recommend for this audience so with that I'll say thank you
very much and we will turn it over for Q&A [Cecilia] I do have one question
as people think of a question with regard to funding is there continued support for these three databases to be
continuously updated on a given cycle? [Julia] well that's a wonderful
start on that. for the PFAS-Tox database we did get funding to update
the database with PF
OA and PFOS which I mentioned in my talk were was going to be done
by the end of June of this year but in terms of updating the whole database our goal is to do
that every couple of years and we don't have great sources of funding for that kind of work a lot
of private family foundations don't necessarily fund that sort of maintenance type of role and
NIH funding and other sources of funding aren't it's not the most exciting thing to fund as well
so if anyone actually on this call has tips
for the kind of translational funding that that would
require I think that that would be that would be really wonderful for the PFAS-TOX database
and I'll let Alissa respond for the others [Alissa] yeah so we have had two well
we've had a series of three grants from the National Science Foundation found that
have supported different aspects of our work so a previous project looked at the social and
scientific discovery and that's the project that let us create the original the known PFAS
co
ntamination site database we're currently funded for a project looking at PFAS governance
and part of that grant was to create and maintain this the governance database we have been
very fortunate to have a wonderful series of full-time research assistants through
Northeastern University which has program called the co-op program Julia you might
understand co-ops better than I do since I'm not actually at Northeastern but my
understanding is it basically is a work experience for students du
ring their four years of
college or during their undergraduate degree and so Co-op students work and are paid for 35 hours
a week of of work as part of their Co-op process and there are a few different entities within
Northeastern that have paid for part or all of the salary of those co-ops and so those students
do a lot of the daily maintenance I didn't mention our website but we have Daily News updates
on our website that feed into other PFAS oriented websites as well like PFAS Central
wh
ich is another great news source or a general website for PFAS information so our
students update the website every day they add and update information into these databases
which it does take a lot of work and one of the challenges we always run into is well how can
we how can we continue to do more while also ensuring that the data sets that we have are
as fully accurate as complete and as accurate as possible and so at this point we've been
able to continually update these databases with t
he combination of NSF support to create new
projects and then Northeastern support to continue the maintenance of existing projects that has led
us to make some decisions about what information to include so for example earlier versions of
the known PFAS contamination site database had both the known contamination sites and also a
separate compilation of drinking water testing information and that was feasible in the you know
in 2017 2018 when very few were doing PFAS testing but as more an
d more states started doing their
own systematic drinking water investigations it was no longer feasible for us to continually
compile that data without dedicated funding which we didn't have and so we made the decision
to focus just on the known contamination sites and we've been able to maintain that up to
this point I think going forward our sort of short and medium term intention is certainly to
maintain these information sources and longterm we would evaluate whether the need is still
there and whether whether it's a good use of our resources to maintain them but at this
point we're able to continually maintain them [Cecilia] great thank you so much for
that we do have some questions that have come up the first one how can researchers from
other institutions contribute to your research? [Julia] well I would say we work collaboratively
across multiple institutions and fields with a range of different people and so we're always
you know interested to collaborate or or wor
k with folks and I think it would just take an
email and maybe setting up a time to to chat and see how we can work together for us when we
do our database updates it does take a team of people Alissa mentioned the co-op program at
Notheastern and I certainly take advantage of that as an assistant professor here we have an
army of of undergrads that are working on the database but having higher level information
Health Science experts on the team is a hugely beneficial so I could definitely
see a role
for some kind of collaborative partnership [Alissa] yeah I would agree and then I
would also add that in addition to actual collaborations which we're always excited
excited to talk about we're also just very excited to share data and so as I mentioned we
have databases of known contamination sites and the presumptive contamination and we're happy
to share those we have a user agreement that is very straightforward and so you also are
welcome to just ask for data in terms of th
e contamination sites the governance database
as well I should have mentioned this but the governance database website you can download
all of your results and so you can do whatever search you're interested in and then download
the results as a CSV file and just use those results for whatever purposes you want and we
include information about how then to cite the data and so you're welcome to use the data
without forming a formal collaboration and if you're interested in more interactive
work we'd be very happy to hear from you [Cecilia] great thank you for that
[Alissa] and includes also sharing data with students we've shared the data
with lots of graduate students as well g [Cecilia] great more specific questions
are there immediate actions that state cancer prevention and control programs
can do in regard to PFAS education and policy and I can I think I can answer part of this
is that having followed this since a New Hampshire conversation I had with a state epidemiologi
st
your newsletter is sent out monthly from the project and that has advocacy organizations that
are listed in collaboration and also there are the PFAS conferences that have happened in the past
where connections can be made between advocacy organizations that educate as well as inform
[Alissa] excellent yeah I just put the link to our newsletter in the chat and
the next national PFAS conference is coming up in June June 10th to 12th
in Ann Arbor and I can find the website and put that in a
s well I'll also say one
of the websites that Julia put up on the resources page the PFAS Exchange has a
wealth of very user friendly resources fact sheets information for clinicians and so
that might be some very useful information as well [Julia] I was just going to add there might
also be some useful information coming out of I think it's ATDS or no IR recently
had a call for data this last fall for cancer studies related to PFOA and PFOS
that may be useful for that work going forward b
ut the cancer is an area we've been
interested in trying to leverage the database for to try to inform some of the community
efforts organizing efforts around cancer because that's sort of been identified to us as
a need that that we could help fill so but yeah [Cecilia] great thank you so much for that
couple of other comments and questions are coming up there is one asking about
practical suggestions but it looks like the resource you've mentioned
such as Silent Spring and PFAS Exchange
would have those I would also
mention that Medlineplus probably may have some links to PFAS exposure mitigation
and I would suggest looking at those to get more information but also look at the
resources are listed as an organization we can't actually give advice per se but
we can also point you to the information that may have helpful helpful details and
following up on that there is a question about other countries are there other
countries who have been more progressive in their recomme
ndations regard to PFAS
modern education personally I know that PFAS is being found all over and I'm seeing
different kinds of levels of response could you comment on that I know this is a US focused
database such as the governance database and the known contamination sites but what have you
learned from your International Community? [Alissa] I'll put in another website
this is the forever pollution project which was led by a team of journalists originally
at Le Monde and then it expanded
to include dozens of investigative journalists around the
European Union and this project used our known and contamination site model to develop
similar sort of parallel databases for the European Union and I I think that often when
we think about regulatory protections around chemical toxicant in particular there
certainly is a lot of attention to the European Union because their program the
reach program which is sort of parallel to our TSCA the Toxic Substances Control Act it
does have
a higher sort of data requirement for the evaluation of chemical risk and safety
and it has higher burdens on chemical producers to develop and share data and so there
are many ways in which that European Union system is more precautionary in terms of
environmental health protection within the EU there have been individual countries that have
acted more quickly and so there are individual countries that have developed drinking
water levels for example Denmark has been more proactive on PFAS
testing and drinking
water remediation than the EU as a whole up to up until this point and so in terms
of international work the EU or Australia has also done some regulatory work
on the PFAS front although they have different screening levels as well I wouldn't
say that any any country has figured it out though in terms of health protection from PFAS
and in terms of addressing the contamination crisis from a more protective way if we're not
treating the upstream sources of PFAS and in pa
rticular focusing on reducing the ongoing
and new emissions of virtually all PFAS and virtually all use uses we will continue
to be experiencing these problems because of the incredible persistence and long
life the the foreverness of this class of chemicals and so we really do need to be
thinking about upstream protections including dramatic reductions on the production
and use of chemicals of PFAS chemicals [Cecilia] well thank you so much for your
presentation and for your time with us
doing this Q&A so for our additional engagement time
we're going to be using something called a padlet so basically each question of the first three
going from left to right it's basically asking do you find that there's a way you could use one
of the databases during the presentation that was discussed and then the fourth question is more
of a brainstorm to say what would you like to see in a future database what kind of data would it
have on PFAS or and maybe what would you call it? thank
you for attending today and
participating and thank you to our guest speakers for wonderful presentation
we hope to see you at future sessions [music] thanks for watching this video
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