Novel Fluorinated Compounds Discovered In Firefighters' Blood

ckwu writes: Perfluorinated compounds help firefighting foams rapidly flow over flaming liquids such as gasoline and jet fuel, cooling and quenching fires. But despite environmental scientists' concerns about these possibly toxic compounds, researchers don't know the identity of many of the chemicals in the mixtures on the market. For the first time, a new study borrows a medical research tool to pinpoint fluorochemicals in the blood of firefighters, identifying novel compounds that have never before been publicly reported.

Comments

Why don't they know?

[Harlequin80]

I would have thought that something used by the fireservice in large quantities and knowingly dispersed into the wider environment would have its chemical composition well known.

There are a multitude of environmental, health and liability issues here and I simply don't buy it that the ingredients are a mystery. I'm sure that there are chemicals available which are excellent at fire fighting but also highly toxic and that those chemicals aren't used because of their lethality.

I can just imaging the defence now. "So Mr Government, you're telling me that you gave firefighters this product, to use on fires in public spaces where both trained personnel and the public can be expected to be and you didn't know what was in it?" "Correct" "Prosecution rests its case"

Re:Why don't they know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any evidence of the lethality of them? I've got pretty good evidence that firefighters are living with them in the blood, and, well, no evidence, at all, to suggest that these are causal for any cancers. Fire is nasty. Fires create all sorts of imaginable and many unimaginable carcinogens (large sooty molecules). Pointing to a particular class of florinated compounds, and then asserting that they're only from foam, which is used only on liquid fuel fires, is a bit of a stretch. If you want to see what's in the foam, buy some and throw it through a pretty standard battery of tests. Not rocket science, undergrad chemistry.

Re:Why don't they know?

[Will.Woodhull]

Is this the Dumb and Dumber show? Is slashdot in a mad race toward the lowest IQ that can still author a comment? Come on, guys, you are giving nerds and geeks a bad name.

You do realize it would take a thick book to document all the chemical changes that happen in a candle flame? (Everyone here has seen a candle flame at least once, right?) And that candle flame is a highly controlled burn.

So do you really think anyone can add a known fluorinated chemistry to a wild fire that is creating all kinds of products of incomplete combustion and have any idea how one of the most reactive elements in the periodic table is going to combine with who the hell knows what?

Of course no one knows what the chemical compositions of the stuff that is getting into the firefighters might be. All they can recover is the products after a second very complex set of chemical reactions; after whatever further reactions occur in the lungs or the blood or maybe the liver. At this point, even the portal of entry can only be guessed at. The environmental chemists have their work cut out for them on this one.

Re:Why don't they know?

[Tailhook]

I would have thought

You have inflated expectations of our knowledge.

Buckyballs are common in nature. They proliferate around campfires. We didn't realize that until after we "first generated" (as Wikipedia puts it) buckyballs in a lab and awarded Nobel Prizes for it thirty years ago.

When some chemical company reacts Fluorine with whatever to make fire retardant is it really surprising that a variety of molecular species appear? We don't actually put each molecule under a STEM and serialize it. The product is "mostly" some intended molecule and the rest is..... meh. Whatever!

You live in that world. You are wearing it, eating it and using a big pile of polymer and highly refined minerals to demonstrate your ignorance with it, and despite the fact that we probably haven't cataloged more than a fraction of what all that stuff is out-gassing into your lungs you'll probably live to be a ripe old 90+ because of it. So try not to spaz out about it.

These Fluorine compounds are close to inert which is why they persist so long. Unless the firefighters are actually eating their fire retardant with coffee each morning they are unlikely to suffer any effects at all from the minuscule amounts that manage to get past their filters and whatnot. And if they do then they have their gold plated government funded health care, public union negotiated disability plans and similarly generous pensions to help them cope. Fighting fires is a dangerous occupation.

deathtrap

[Virtucon]

so in an attempt to save property we're subjecting firefighters to increased risk of cancer and thyroid disease.