Episode #276
Mara Hoplamazian: PFAS + Safe Drinking Water

Mara Hoplamazian brings the issue of PFAS safe drinking water into sharp focus, tracing how communities in New Hampshire were left to navigate contamination, uncertainty, and corporate denial long before federal regulators acted. Drawing on their reporting for New Hampshire Public Radio’s four-part series Safe to Drink, they explain how Merrimack became a flashpoint in the national fight over forever chemicals, public health, and accountability. On Friday, May 15, 2026, our podcast feed will carry Episode One of Safe to Drink, giving listeners a chance to hear the reporting itself.

Mara Hoplamazian’s interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewd Mara Hoplamazian at Long Wind Farm on April 20, 2026:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I am talking today to Mara Hoplamazian. Mara, we met each other at a reading at the Dartmouth Bookstore, and you’re one of the major characters in one of the chapters. I like that, Mara, because we’d already set up this interview. I’m really pleased to be talking with you. I think you’re a fine young journalist, and you have a great career ahead of you.

Dave Chapman 0:26
I’m sure you did amazing work on a podcast for New Hampshire Public Radio, where you work, that was called “Safe to Drink.” It starts with PFAS pollution in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and it goes quite a few other places from there. How did you get started on that story?

Mara Hoplamazian 0:54
It’s a good question. When I moved to New Hampshire, I’d never heard of PFAS chemicals. I had no idea what they were. I was assigned a story – I think it was maybe the first or second story I was ever assigned in the newsroom – to cover a remediation project at a well on New Hampshire’s seacoast that had PFAS contamination in it. I got up to speed really fast, and started talking to folks all across the state who’d experienced PFAS contamination in their water.

Mara Hoplamazian 1:19
In New Hampshire, it’s mainly one community on the seacoast and this community in Merrimack, New Hampshire, which is in southern New Hampshire. I just really dropped into that world and had lots and lots of long conversations with folks who had been drinking PFAS for a long time without knowing it, and then became activists and started advocating for stricter regulations and remediation in their communities.

Dave Chapman 1:48
Wait, because we have a very diverse audience, and many of them also will not have heard of PFAS, although many of them will have listened to other episodes we’ve done on it. What are PFAS?

Mara Hoplamazian 2:03
A great question. Sometimes they’re called “forever chemicals.” You might know them by that name. They’re per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. PFAS is an acronym. One researcher at Dartmouth I talked to calls them chemical weirdos, which is sort of how I think of them. They’re just super weird chemicals with unique properties that make them really useful for stuff that we like as humans, like pans that dough or eggs don’t stick to, or very waterproof raincoats.

Mara Hoplamazian 2:26
But they also make them stick around in the environment for a long time, hence the “forever chemical” nickname, and they persist and accumulate in our bodies. They stay in our bodies for a long time, and because they stay for a long time, if you keep ingesting them, they’ll accumulate. So that’s bioaccumulation.

Mara Hoplamazian 2:55
Various PFAS chemicals – it’s a group of chemicals. There are more than 15,000 of them, by some accounts – and there’s research that shows that they are harmful to human health. They’re connected to different kinds of cancers, and different health effects, like low birth weight, preeclampsia, and ulcerative colitis. They’re hazards that are in much of our drinking water.

Dave Chapman 3:22
It seems like, unfortunately, we have become hardened to this, almost cynical, that we almost take it for granted that there are chemicals that we’re showered with that are in our bodies, and we accept it. Apparently, I don’t know if we accept that it’s a price worth paying, or we just accept that there’s nothing we can do about it.

Dave Chapman 3:53
I was fascinated in your story, as you talked to the workers at the Saint-Gobain plant, and they accepted it. They went into it. They said, “I worked in a warehouse. When you’re at the bottom of the barrel, you’ve got to work at the plant. You get exposed to all the chemicals that other people don’t have to deal with, and something’s going to happen, you know.”

Mara Hoplamazian 4:21
Those conversations with former workers at the Saint-Gobain plant were some of the most impactful for me as a reporter. And it let me see a part of this story that I think there is not a lot of reporting about – the folks who are closest to these chemicals. I do think there is some level of, I don’t know if I would call it acceptance, but buy-in. Maybe acceptance is the right word.

Dave Chapman 4:47
Kind of a fatalistic acceptance. A good thing but…

Mara Hoplamazian 4:56
That’s what’s happening. But at the same time, many of the workers I talked to said they tried for years to get Saint-Gobain to pay attention to the PFOA content and the chemicals they were using. They asked questions over and over to management. They didn’t feel that what was happening was right in many cases, and did try to get the company to change.

Mara Hoplamazian 5:21
In my personal life, I feel this too. There is this sense of, if I thought about this all the time, and every time I drank a sip of water, was thinking about the PFAS going into my body, I would drive myself crazy. At the same time, there are things we can do, and I think from the workers to the advocates to the scientists that I talked to, everyone was trying to find their own balance there of how much we just accept this as a part of our lives and how much we push back against it.

Dave Chapman 5:52
It seemed to me that the people you talked to who actually had gotten cancer or gotten sick, or whose loved ones had gotten sick, there wasn’t this acceptance. There was this bitter sense of anger.

Mara Hoplamazian 6:04
Yeah. I think, obviously, when you get cancer, I haven’t had cancer, but I’ve talked to many, many folks who have shared their experiences with me, there’s a search for answers, and you want to know why this thing is happening.

Mara Hoplamazian 6:05
To know that your water is contaminated with a chemical that is dangerous to humans and linked, and in many cases considered carcinogenic, and to know that you have cancer after drinking that water, but to not have anybody be able to tell you this is why you have cancer, it sounds maddening. Really, really frustrating.

Mara Hoplamazian 6:49
I have seen, from the advocates I’ve spoken with, many of them do come from that background where they’ve had a personal health experience that has led them to advocating for keeping others safe from these chemicals.

Dave Chapman 7:03
Could you tell me a little bit about how you got into this story? The Merrimack, New Hampshire, was the cluster that you built the story around, which has a manufacturing plant that uses a lot of PFAS-impregnated fabrics and whatnot. When you approached the story, what did you find?

Mara Hoplamazian 7:32
I pitched sort of a long-form podcast approach to the story right as Saint-Gobain was closing up shop, so they announced that they were shutting down their factory in Merrimack.

Mara Hoplamazian 7:43
I had all these questions like, “Okay, this company is leaving, but these are ‘forever chemicals.’ They’re going to be in the soil and the water for a really long time. How are regulators going to deal with this? To what extent is the company going to be responsible for continuing to remediate here? How are people in town feeling about this? Folks who, in many cases, have been on bottled water for many years, some for up to almost a decade, because of this contamination, and have not had remediation come to their homes yet.”

Mara Hoplamazian 8:16
That’s what made me want to focus on Merrimack. Over the course of our reporting, we talked to many folks in Merrimack, but also in other communities that had Saint-Gobain plants, like Hoosick Falls, New York, and Bennington, Vermont. As we talked to folks in other towns, I started to see a pattern emerge. It was like there were all these parallel universes where communities had experienced water contamination.

Mara Hoplamazian 8:45
In some cases, like in Hoosick Falls, New York, one person decided he wanted to figure out what was in their water. He tested the water himself. He advocated with the mayor and with the state to get remediation done. His name is Michael Hickey, and his advocacy is the reason people in Merrimack even know that there is PFAS in the water.

Dave Chapman 9:07
His advocacy began because his father died at 70 of kidney cancer.

Mara Hoplamazian 9:14
Kidney Cancer, yes. I’m not sure if he was 70 years old?

Dave Chapman 9:18
He was 70 years old. He was young. He’d just retired.

Mara Hoplamazian 9:21
Yeah. I know his age, but I don’t have it top of my head. His father died just after retiring of kidney cancer. Michael had worked at Saint-Gobain. His father had worked at Saint-Gobain. His mother had worked at Saint-Gobain. Michael knew what they were using in the factory. He Googled “Teflon and cancer” and found the study called the C8 Study that came out in the 2010s and thought to himself…

Dave Chapman 9:53
Was that the part of the study that Rob Bilott brought about?

Mara Hoplamazian 9:56
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 9:57
We’ll talk about that.

Mara Hoplamazian 9:58
He decided he needed to figure out if the stuff that was making people sick in West Virginia was in his water too. But the thing that really struck me from talking to all these folks in these towns that had Saint-Gobain plants was that the story just kind of kept repeating. It was like the same play being staged in all these different towns, the same script, many of the same characters, but it was happening over and over, and it felt like there was no unifying force to stop it.

Mara Hoplamazian 10:32
That was in part because there were no federal regulations for PFAS chemicals until 2024. For decades after these chemicals started being produced in the 1940s, there was no federal standard for how much of them could be in drinking water, and it led to these separate communities all having to fight this battle on their own.

Dave Chapman 10:54
This raises such a topical question for our time. I have good friends now who are opposed to large government and are opposed to government regulation. But how is the citizen supposed to protect themselves from DuPont or 3M? These are massively powerful companies.

Dave Chapman 11:18
Did 3M and DuPont know that the chemicals that they were manufacturing, that did not exist in nature, did they know that these chemicals were, in fact, dangerous for people?

Mara Hoplamazian 11:32
They did. There’s great reporting on this from Sharon Lerner and Mariah Blake. Many reporters have covered the fact that DuPont and 3M knew that the chemicals they were making were harmful. I relied on a lot of that reporting in my work.

Mara Hoplamazian 11:50
But that story really connects through to today, because these companies that created these chemicals, starting in the 1940s, were sitting on a lot of this data that showed they were harmful to rats, they were harmful to dogs, they were in human blood all across the country, and were not sharing that data with federal regulators.

Mara Hoplamazian 12:18
It really delayed the regulation of these chemicals and the ability of federal regulators to respond to them and to respond when they made their way into drinking water.

Dave Chapman 12:30
Have they responded now?

Mara Hoplamazian 12:33
Federal regulators?

Dave Chapman 12:34
Yes.

Mara Hoplamazian 12:35
They have. In 2024, the EPA created drinking water standards for a handful of PFAS chemicals. Remember, there are 1,000s of them, so they are not all regulated. They created standards for PFOA and PFOS, which are two of the legacy PFAS chemicals not really in use anymore. Then a group of other ones, including GenX, which are the newer PFAS chemicals.

Mara Hoplamazian 13:02
Those regulations, there is some uncertainty about the future of them. The Trump administration has announced that they are seeking to repeal all of them, except for the PFOA and PFOS standards. So which PFAS chemicals are regulated may change.

Mara Hoplamazian 13:20
The deadline initially for water systems to treat for those chemicals was 2029. The Trump administration has announced they want to extend it to 2031. The way that these chemicals will be regulated in the future is still a little bit uncertain, but there are some federal regulations.

Dave Chapman 13:37
Yeah, it is slowly moving there. I was struck in your reporting by the fact that different states had their own standards that were almost always stricter than the EPA standards.

Mara Hoplamazian 13:50
Yeah. New Hampshire and I think Vermont also were some of the first states to create standards. New Hampshire, in 2019, had standards before the federal government created PFAS standards.

Dave Chapman 14:04
Little crazy that the state should have to do that. Of course, they are not very well equipped for the level of science required to come up with what is a safe level. In your story, it was a constant conversation between citizens and government officials about, “Is the water safe to drink?” It seemed that the officials genuinely had no idea.

Mara Hoplamazian 14:33
There’s a really striking YouTube video of a meeting from 2016 where New Hampshire officials are trying to explain to people in Merrimack whether they can drink their water or not. Folks come up and ask a series of questions. A doctor says, “Is this safe for my pregnant patients to drink?” A man asks, “I’m a hunter. Can I eat the animals that I’m killing in this area? They’ve been drinking the water.” People are asking all kinds of questions, and over and over, the regulators say, “We don’t really know.”

Mara Hoplamazian 14:56
It is tough to watch in 2026 that meeting from a decade ago, because there was actually some good science around PFAS chemicals at the time. Other states were providing clearer guidance to folks, and that was part of the reporting too, understanding why New Hampshire was so unclear about what to advise people.

Mara Hoplamazian 15:39
In part, it was because the levels in New Hampshire were lower than in places like Hoosick Falls and Bennington. I think New Hampshire regulators didn’t really know how to handle levels that were so much lower than other places and what the EPA was saying at the time, but it was present and higher than what the federal regulations now say is okay.

Dave Chapman 16:05
Even the current federal regulations would say that those levels were dangerous.

Mara Hoplamazian 16:10
Yes.

Dave Chapman 16:13
At the time, the state regulations said those levels were safe?

Mara Hoplamazian 16:17
There were no state regulations. The state regulations came about in 2019 after actually a lot of advocacy from folks in Merrimack. The state had no regulations. There were no federal regulations, and so state officials were without a lot of guidance on how to advise people whether they should drink their water or not.

Mara Hoplamazian 16:20
The regulators I have talked to about this, it was really confusing, and one of them said he still thinks about the questions he got at that meeting in 2016. PFAS chemicals, one thing to know is we test and treat and regulate them at such low levels.

Mara Hoplamazian 16:57
One of the regulators I talked to said he was used to regulating things like arsenic and other harmful chemicals that can be in our water in parts per billion. PFAS are regulated in parts per trillion, which is 1,000 times smaller than a part per billion. The idea that something in such tiny amounts could be a problem in water, I think it was new to a lot of regulators.

Dave Chapman 17:19
A part per billion is already staggering to try and imagine. I just heard a talk by Tyrone Hayes about Atrazine. He was talking about parts per billion, which was a tiny amount, and yet he was talking about highly elevated levels in people’s blood who worked with the chemical in agriculture. Let’s talk about how many parts per trillion are considered to be acceptable by the government now for PFOS.

Mara Hoplamazian 17:59
PFAS and PFOS, the levels are set at four parts per trillion. The EPA set maximum contaminant levels, which is the legal limit. Those are not four parts per trillion. The MCLG, or the goal, is just based on human health, like in an ideal world, if we could treat and test as low as possible, they say that is zero, because there is no safe level of these chemicals to be drinking. But four parts per trillion is what water systems have to treat to.

Dave Chapman 18:37
They accumulate in your body, even the four parts per trillion.

Mara Hoplamazian 18:40
They do. Almost every person in this country has PFAS in our bodies. Because they accumulate, scientists measure PFAS in blood in parts per billion, even though we measure it in water in parts per trillion. If you think about drinking parts per trillion, if you drink six cups of water a day or something, it accumulates in your body over time, and so it builds up to such high amounts that they are in the thousands of parts per trillion. Then you call it a part per billion in your blood.

Dave Chapman 19:15
Have you tested yourself?

Dave Chapman 19:16
I have not tested myself. I looked into what is in my water. I checked with my water utility company – my apartments on public water in Concord – and the tests all came back non-detect or low enough. There was one well that they tested that is mixed with other wells that was above four parts per trillion, but the finished water, [inaudible 19:42], is under.

Dave Chapman 19:43
I tried to test myself before I gave a talk last year.

Mara Hoplamazian 19:46
Did you?

Dave Chapman 19:46
I did. My doctor could not figure out how to have me tested anywhere.

Mara Hoplamazian 19:51
Yeah. I’ve heard that from a lot of folks that it is hard to figure out how to get your blood tested. Insurance companies in New Hampshire are required to cover the cost of testing. That is something folks want to bring up with their doctor, just something to know. I think over time it has gotten more straightforward, but I am not really sure what the current situation is.

Dave Chapman 20:14
You went to Merrimack, and you came upon a community that was… By the time you got to Merrimack, had Saint-Gobain already closed?

Mara Hoplamazian 20:24
I started reporting in Merrimack when I started on NHPR in 2021 or so. Saint-Gobain closed. I’m pretty sure it was 2023 or 2024. I’ll check that for you. I was reporting before they closed, and then after they closed,

Dave Chapman 20:47
When they closed, did that close the window on their liability?

Mara Hoplamazian 20:54
They have an agreement with the state, which says they need to remediate the wells within a radius of their plant, and that work is still ongoing. Even though the plant has been torn down, all the workers are not working there anymore. It is literally like a concrete slab and some trees where their plant used to be.

Mara Hoplamazian 21:18
Saint-Gobain is still doing remediation work in the area. They just agreed to help build a new water line in Londonderry, which is a town close to Merrimack, because their contamination was not just in Merrimack, it was in surrounding towns as well. But Saint-Gobain, the company, maintains that there are other sources of PFAS contamination, and it is so widely used that they say they are not responsible for all of the contamination in the water.

Mara Hoplamazian 21:48
The last I checked, they were still going back and forth with state regulators on the extent to which they are responsible for remediating the soil and the groundwater at the facility and the immediate surroundings. I do not know if it is totally ironed out yet how much they will continue to be responsible for that. There are still ongoing class action lawsuits against the company in Merrimack.

Dave Chapman 22:14
In your reporting, you also covered your attempts to have conversations with 3M and DuPont. DuPont basically said, “We sold that part of our company. We have nothing to do with it. You need to talk to them.”

Mara Hoplamazian 22:32
Yeah, DuPont has changed hats lots of times. They sold Chemours, I do not know how people pronounce it, and we reached out to them. They did not respond to a request for comment. The company now known as DuPont essentially said, “We have nothing to do with this these days.”

Dave Chapman 23:04
This seems to be what happens, that these companies make a fortune ignoring the destruction that is being caused, and then they leave it. They declare bankruptcy, or they sell that part of the company, and everyone has left. It is just that they might not be the best partners for us in terms of who is going to make sure that the processes are safe. It does not seem that they are very responsible to me.

Mara Hoplamazian 23:38
Yeah. I think many folks would agree with you. From what we covered in New Hampshire, we looked into court documents that showed communications back into the 2000s. The contamination in Merrimack was made public in 2016. We were looking at emails from the early 2000s that showed they were considering and talking about PFAS. They were testing their stacks to see how much was getting out.

Mara Hoplamazian 24:07
They knew as early as 2004 that there was PFAS being emitted from the factory. They created a plan to test their employees’ blood for PFAS in the early 2000s, or the mid aughts. There is evidence that Saint-Gobain, at least in conversation with DuPont – one of the manufacturers of these chemicals – were trying to figure out what to do about this.

Mara Hoplamazian 24:33
They created media statements. They created talking points if customers asked them questions about the dangers of these chemicals. Yet, it was not until 2016 that people who lived next to this plant knew that there was contamination in their water.

Dave Chapman 24:49
As I listened to your story, at your podcast, it seemed that the heroes of this were citizens who basically said, “We do not believe you. We are going to find out for ourselves.” They were not scientists. They were talking to scientists. They were trying to read scientific research, but they were just regular people who were concerned.

Dave Chapman 25:16
One of the things that you said is, in the beginning, a lot of the people who were standing up and challenging whether this was safe were women, and that they were called “hysterical women” who were overreacting. I have encountered this talking about pesticides, and the pesticide companies have these actual scientists who they hire to speak and tear apart people like me, because they are scientists.

Dave Chapman 25:50
They get PhDs and they are very knowledgeable – it does not make them right. One of the things that they accuse people who question the safety of pesticides of is that they are creating a climate of fear that is very unhealthy for people.

Dave Chapman 25:52
I think it is almost charming that they are so concerned for people’s welfare that they do not want them to be anxious about these things. They are not questioning whether there is anything to be anxious about, just that we should not be creating fear. That was one of the charges against the so-called “hysterical women.”

Mara Hoplamazian 26:29
The funny thing about fear is I think it thrives in information vacuums. It is easy to be afraid when you do not have complete information and you do not know something. What a lot of the folks, the advocates that I spoke with, were advocating for was more information. They wanted to know the levels in the water. They wanted to know the levels in the blood. They wanted to know the science around whether it was safe and how much was safe.

Mara Hoplamazian 27:00
I have always found that a little strange, because I think part of what they were trying to do was to tone down the fear by gathering more information and figuring out what the risks actually were, and then addressing those risks. But there was a lot of, in Merrimack particularly around 2016, a lot of accusations being thrown around about fearmongering, or what one of the women I spoke with said.

Mara Hoplamazian 27:30
She and her group were called “hysterical women.” There was a town meeting where a town official said, “I am drinking this water. My dogs are drinking this water. I am feeding this water to my kid.” In some ways, he was working off the information he was getting from the state, which was that the water that he was drinking was safe to drink.

Mara Hoplamazian 27:51
I think how we as humans manage risk and assess risk and feel fear or address fear, it is so individual. But I do think, at least in my personal life, having more information has always made me feel a little bit less afraid.

Dave Chapman 28:10
Trying to figure out which information you can trust is a big challenge, because there is a lot of misinformation. As Naomi Oreskes has taught me, there is a difference between misinformation and disinformation. Disinformation being when they know it is not true, but they want to convince you of something regardless, by telling you something that they know is not true.

Dave Chapman 28:33
The most flagrant example is tobacco companies putting out a great deal of disinformation about the safety of tobacco. It was not safe. They knew it was not safe, and they simply misrepresented the facts as best they could, as long as they could. They became the merchants of doubt.

Mara Hoplamazian 29:01
The sort of “doubt is our product” is something that we also saw in our reporting on this. Rob Bilott, who was the lawyer who uncovered what was going on in Parkersburg, West Virginia…

Dave Chapman 29:15
Let’s talk about Parkersburg. It is a famous story, but it is an important one. What happened in Parkersburg, West Virginia?

Mara Hoplamazian 29:22
It all started with a farmer, Wilbur Tennant. He had a cattle farm.

Dave Chapman 29:32
Amazing sounding person. I really recommend you get to watch a video of Wilbur. Sorry, go ahead.

Mara Hoplamazian 29:39
He is. His videos from this period of time in the 1990s are really hard to watch, because he essentially took a camcorder and walked through his farm and took videos of cows that were emaciated, that were sick, that were dying. Hundreds of his cows died.

Mara Hoplamazian 29:39
There is one video that I just cannot get out of my head where there is a calf that he is burning on a burn pile. I cannot remember what number calf it is, it is in the double digits that he has had to burn like that. Essentially, he starts seeing foam in the river that runs into his cattle farm, and his cows are drinking this water. He notices his cows getting sick. He describes them going mad and getting aggressive and seeming just really, really upset.

Mara Hoplamazian 29:39
He also notices fish dying in the river. He notices other wildlife dying: deer, and birds. He knows that there is a landfill upstream from him where DuPont is putting their materials when they discard them. He thinks that that is why his animals are getting sick. He believes that there is a contaminant coming from that landfill and into his farm and sickening his animals.

Mara Hoplamazian 30:15
He has trouble finding folks in Parkersburg, where he lives, who will help him figure it out, to get to the bottom of it or respond. Then he finds Rob Bilott, who is a lawyer. They know each other through a friend of Rob Bilott’s grandmother. Rob Bilott is not the kind of lawyer who usually takes on these cases. He is an environmental lawyer, but he generally represents companies.

Dave Chapman 30:32
He’s usually on the other side.

Mara Hoplamazian 29:39
He’s usually on the other side, exactly. But he takes on the case.

Dave Chapman 30:28
He’s kind of a big town lawyer.

Mara Hoplamazian 30:37
Yes.

Dave Chapman 30:38
Is he from a city down there?

Mara Hoplamazian 30:46
I have to refresh my memory on this. I think he grew up in Parkersburg, and his family is in the area, but he has moved to a city in Ohio. He is working for a big law firm.

Dave Chapman 30:46
Wilbur goes and finds this guy who is a friend of a friend in the family and says, “Hey, will you help me?”

Mara Hoplamazian 30:46
Exactly. Rob Bilott ends up suing DuPont, and through that lawsuit, he gathers just this treasure trove of documents, and in that treasure trove of documents, he finds references to a chemical called PFOA that he has never heard of before. It is not regulated, and nobody has ever heard of it, and he cannot figure out what is up with this chemical.

Mara Hoplamazian 30:54
Slowly it becomes clear to Rob Bilott that DuPont has been using this chemical, has been dumping it at this landfill, and has been testing this chemical on rats, dogs, and other animals, and has been testing the blood of its own workers, and has found out that it is toxic, that it is not good for humans and potentially dangerous for human health, and has not disclosed this to federal regulators, as the company is required to do.

Mara Hoplamazian 33:04
So in 2001, Rob Bilott writes a letter to the EPA, laying out his findings, saying, “There is this chemical. It is making people sick, and it is not just in this landfill; it is in the drinking water.” DuPont had tested the drinking water, knew that it was in the drinking water of the surrounding communities around their Parkersburg factory. That kicks off the first wave of the EPA responding to this.

Mara Hoplamazian 33:35
Out of the lawsuit in Parkersburg, there is a health study called the C8 Health Study, where roughly 70,000 people give blood. The idea behind that health study is to identify, is this chemical making people sick? Is this chemical in the water, in our blood? Is this causing particular diseases? The study finds yes, it is. It is linked to six different diseases.

Mara Hoplamazian 34:07
In legal language, they call it a probable link, which means that it is more likely than not that people’s exposure to these chemicals is connected to their having these diseases. The diseases are kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, preeclampsia, thyroid disease, and high cholesterol. These were the six diseases that were linked in that C8 Health Study.

Dave Chapman 34:43
These things will make you pretty sick or kill them.

Mara Hoplamazian 34:46
Yeah, it depends on how much you are drinking and over what course of time, and definitely other factors. This is one of the hardest things, I think, for epidemiologists, because we cannot really say a person’s individual disease is caused by their individual consumption of these chemicals.

Dave Chapman 35:04
It was the great defense of the tobacco companies. You cannot prove that this person got cancer because of tobacco. We can just demonstrate that a large number of people will get cancer because of tobacco, but we never know which one.

Mara Hoplamazian 35:20
This is in part why the C8 Study is important, because DuPont essentially agreed, as part of this lawsuit, that if a probable link was found, people could sue based on that probable link. People did sue and won those lawsuits. But I think nowadays, for folks in communities that have had legacy contamination, who are sick or see family members or neighbors getting sick, it is really frustrating because you cannot really say with certainty that this is the reason for these particular illnesses.

Dave Chapman 35:54
That’s right. One thing I just want to say, it takes a fair amount of gumption to sue DuPont. It is not an inexpensive thing to do. We sued the USDA. It was a tiny little lawsuit about whether or not they could call hydroponics organic. We lost the lawsuit.

Dave Chapman 36:17
They said, “This cannot be a precedent. We are not saying you are wrong. We are just saying we are not going to challenge a federal agency. We just do not feel like that is our job. You did not word it right for what you wanted to prove.” Okay, but that cost a million dollars. Not my million dollars. Thank you very much Center for Food Safety, but it is very expensive.

Dave Chapman 36:40
To sue DuPont is truly David and Goliath, and you have a very small slingshot, and they have a very large shield. Yet they won. What changed because of that?

Mara Hoplamazian 36:56
Yeah, this was something I talked to Rob Bilott about, because I asked him to reflect on the last 25 years since 2001. He said it was a win for the EPA to start paying attention. They did in the 2000s get DuPont and other companies that were manufacturing these chemicals to voluntarily phase out a few of the legacy PFAS chemicals. But Rob Bilott said, over and over, the thing he really wanted was not happening, which is, he really wanted federal drinking water standards.

Mara Hoplamazian 37:34
He wanted there to be rules around how much of this people on public water all across the U.S. could be drinking that were based on health. That did not happen until 2024, so it is a long time between this lawsuit and federal drinking water standards, and for only a handful of the chemicals that have been created.

Dave Chapman 37:57
I know it is a crazy question. Imagine world peace, but do these products make our lives that much better that they are worth dying for?

Mara Hoplamazian 38:14
I think everyone has their own answer to this, and as a reporter, I try really hard to stay away from giving my opinions. What I will say is, reporting on PFAS has caused me to take stock of all of the materials I use in my life and everything that I put in my body. I have made changes.

Mara Hoplamazian 38:39
I built a deep relationship with my cast iron pan and got rid of my non-stick. I swapped out the floss I use, because I floss twice a day. My bar for buying really, really waterproof stuff is higher. You are wearing a waterproof jacket. I love my raincoat.

Mara Hoplamazian 39:04
I bought my raincoat years and years and years ago, before the company I bought it from was not using PFAS anymore, and it has PFAS in it. It keeps me really warm when I go backpacking. I only wear it a few times a year. I kept it because I felt like it would go into a landfill otherwise, or go on someone else’s body.

Mara Hoplamazian 39:26
I think managing our consumer approach to these chemicals is really personal, but having information about it can make it a lot easier. On a big picture scale, do I think super waterproof raincoats are worth dying for when you put it like that? Obviously not.

Mara Hoplamazian 39:49
I do think taking stock of the full health risks from these chemicals and how people are exposed to them and how we can protect people from being exposed to levels of these chemicals that are dangerous is really important. This reporting has shown me that there are many folks who are invested in that and working on it, which gives me hope, and also that it has taken many, many, many years to even make small progress on that, which is hard to watch.

Dave Chapman 40:20
Yeah. All right. Mara Hoplamazian, thank you very much for coming out to the farm.

Mara Hoplamazian 40:29
It’s beautiful here. Thank you so much for having me.

Dave Chapman 40:32
Good. You do great work. Keep it up.

Dave Chapman 40:35
Thanks so much.

Dave Chapman 40:37
For people who are listening to this, we will be posting the first of four episodes of “Safe to Drink.” I recommend you watch it. I recommend you watch the other three too. It is very well done. It is not work to listen to. It sweeps you along.

Mara Hoplamazian 40:59
Thank you so much.

Mara Hoplamazian 41:00
Yeah.