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Novel Fluorinated Compounds Discovered In Firefighters' Blood

Posted by Soulskill on from the prices-paid dept.

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.

16 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Why don't they know? by Harlequin80 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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"

    1. Re:Why don't they know? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      In emergencies a lot of things are overlooked.

      In emergencies fire fighters don't just pick up random shit lying around the place, throw it on the fire, and say, "well, did that make it better or worse?" There are many tests conducted ahead of time before different things are added to the standard equipment. The problem here is that some of those tests seemed to have missed the lethality of the compounds used in various surfactants.

    2. Re:Why don't they know? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Why don't they know? by Will.Woodhull · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Will
    4. Re:Why don't they know? by Harlequin80 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not according to the article. It is a scare pamphlet about how 3m had a compound in foam that they removed in 2002 due to toxicity concerns and that the replacement must also be toxic because it doesn't have a specific name.

      Side effects of combustion are NEVER touched upon

    5. Re:Why don't they know? by Tailhook · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
  2. deathtrap by Virtucon · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    --
    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
    1. Re:deathtrap by atherophage · · Score: 2

      Firefighters here are canaries. It's not like these chemicals are recycled nor used sparingly. Down the drain it goes; where they bio-accumulate, yeah, what ever. Minimum waged disaster restore specialists doing mop-up are in the thick of it too.

  3. No, actually... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...this was found in their blood, implying that the firefighters are just evolving a natural defense against fire.

    1. Re: No, actually... by jd2112 · · Score: 2

      By any chance did the firefighter's children somehow get a free scholarship to some fancy private school run by a bald guy in a wheelchair?

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
  4. Well, to be fair... by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 2

    It's property and lives, and, yes, facing risks on our behalf is pretty much what we ask firefighters to do every single day.

    That's not to say, of course, that we should make them guinea pigs for inadequately tested compounds, or stooges for suppliers trying to cut corners on cost and safety.

  5. What, no MSDS? by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "researchers don't know the identity of many of the chemicals in the mixtures on the market."

    Doesn't pass the smell test.

    1. Re:What, no MSDS? by reverseengineer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I don't know- I went looking for an MSDS for a modern firefighting foam, and the composition listed is:

      Polyethylene glycol: 2.5-10%
      Other components below reportable levels: Greater than 90%

      Now, this is for Ansul-3 Fluoroprotein foam concentrate. It definitely contains some sort of fluorinated compound (fluoroprotein foam agents are at least known to contain a fluorinated surfactant and hydrolyzed protein); the MSDS has absolutely no mention of what it is. In the Environmental Handling section, all it says is "An environmental hazard cannot be excluded in the event of unprofessional handling or disposal." Nothing about how fluorinated surfactants are persistent environmental contaminants or can cause kidney damage in high doses. It is simply written like innocuous polyethylene glycol is the only component. I've seen material safety data sheets for shampoo that have far more information.

      Now, in the specific case covered by the research paper, the "unknown compounds" aren't really that mysterious. They're all either metabolites, chemical precursors, or close chemical relatives (if you're making some some sort of octane derivative, you can expect some hexane to be in there too). And they're all given as 0.1%-1% of the main PFOS surfactant; certainly chemical manufacturers need to exert better control over their processes, minimize byproducts, perform long-term safety studies, etc. And that goes double for anyone making halogenated organic compounds, which now have a substantial record of turning out to be accumulative toxins. But I think if you look at many common manufactured products at trace levels with tandem mass spec, you're going to find some compounds that aren't in the literature.

      --
      "FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
  6. workers have rights, right? by ihtoit · · Score: 2

    Don't firefighters have the right to know about the compounds they're using, for example what to do in case of inhalation of certain gases (halons come to mind) or skin contact with certain foams (eg the ones that contain fluorocarbons, that absorb through the SKIN)!?

    IANAFF (I am not a firefighter) but if I were I would be REFUSING to use anything that I didn't know about that has the potential to react badly with any part of my anatomy, and that includes fire retardent FC foams, smothering heavy gases, bubble blankets... job be damned, my job is to fight fires not knowingly endanger myself in ignorance of potential AND AVOIDABLE hazards.

    --
    Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
  7. Anarcho-capitalism out of control? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The story here isn't some novel way to find chemical compounds in a substance by testing humans. That's cool, but the real story here is why the hell don't we know?

    We know our politicians in the US are able to be purchased by a high bidder, but are the companies providing firefighting compounds part of the bidders? This is the system that has given us unknown fracking compounds, manufactured doubt about climate change, and attempted coverups for oil and chemical spills. We should ask China how well that's working out for them.

  8. Why would you expect to know EXACTLY ? by redelm · · Score: 4, Informative

    We hardly know everything that is in gasoline (about a hundred compounds, mostly C4-C9 isomers). Jet fuel is more complex and diesel (C10-C20) is just too far gone.

    Why would you expect to know the exact isomers (and recemization) in a fluorinated organic? The fluorine will go on in various places. And even if you think you know, it will change once thermally cracked at fire temperatures.

    Mostly harmless, but there will be the odd one with just the wrong geometry to do somethink nasty, like the way BPA binds estrogen receptors.