Part 2 with Dr. Graham Peaslee.
Brace yourselves as we shed light on the unsettling truths behind PFAS exposure with our esteemed guest, Dr. Graham Peaslee. Not only is he a dedicated professor at the University of Notre Dame, but he has also been actively involved in the fire service for over four years. Together, we venture into his groundbreaking work on identifying PFAS exposure sources from AFFF usage and turnout gear, as well as the compelling documentary, Burned Protect the Protectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VNM0V-P6pg
Part 2 with Dr. Graham Peaslee.
Brace yourselves as we shed light on the unsettling truths behind PFAS exposure with our esteemed guest, Dr. Graham Peaslee. Not only is he a dedicated professor at the University of Notre Dame, but he has also been actively involved in the fire service for over four years. Together, we venture into his groundbreaking work on identifying PFAS exposure sources from AFFF usage and turnout gear, as well as the compelling documentary, Burned Protect the Protectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VNM0V-P6pg
As always, today's podcast is sponsored by Fire Facilities. Makers of reliable all-American steel fire training structures built the way you train Fire facilities, towers, burn rooms and mobile units help you prepare to respond and survive. Welcome back to 3-Point Firefighter. Today's guest is Dr Graham Peasley. Now, Dr Peasley is a professor at the University of Notre Dame who has worked with the fire service for over four years to help remove PFAS exposure sources from both AFFF usage and turnout gear, and you probably know Dr Graham Peasley from the documentary called Burned Protecting the Protectors. I'm going to have a link down in the description and with that, Dr Graham Peasley.
Speaker 2:But if it isn't called in as a fire, it's just called in as an accident or called in as a paramedical. Then they went with the gear in the truck, and then they because in the hot day you can respond quicker and all that sort of stuff. But the guy was asking that we've never cleaned out the truck. There's a little container in the truck where they held all the gear. It says there's about an inch of dust in the bottom of that container. He said, should we be cleaning that out? And you know, I never knew that A the container existed. Well, that was the policy in this particular station. But I said well, yeah, you should not be inhaling that dust and although you're not eating it deliberately, some of it always transfers and gets around. And if you, you know, just like they talk about de-con these days when you're exposed to the toxic chemicals from the smoke if you don't de-con before you get back in the cab and you drive.
Speaker 2:What's that off-gassing do? It's now starting to, it's rubbing against the seats, and so then you can get the toxic chemicals transferred to the seat cushion and things like that. Same thing with this, this, this dust coming off the suit. If you're wearing your turnout gear and you take it back and you don't keep it completely separate all the time, it will transfer. So we have volunteer firefighters here that put the turnout gear in the trunk of their car. Because they are sometimes municipal, sometimes volunteer, they'll take their gear with them. And then you know it's mixed in with the kids' laundry instead of having extractors in the station.
Speaker 2:All that isn't good. And the extruder water, yes, will have PFAS in it. So is that broadening the PFAS exposure? Yeah, and so all these things that people don't think about and I didn't know about, since I didn't know where people were using this, and so I'm learning and I'm, you know. I imagine some poor rookie in South Bend is now vacuuming out this truck once a week. Oops, sorry, dude, but you have a hepper filter vacuum and you suck it up. It'll be safer and that's true, but the really the safe thing to do is get rid of this as a chemical on your gear. And so that was my argument in the paper. We wrote a paper. We caught the attention AIFF because they had a change of leadership right then and Ed Kelly came along and he said he actually asked who's the best PFAS expert in the country. So I told him, I said I'm going to ask her to do a study.
Speaker 2:I said go for it, she'll do a good study, and he did. He got the top person in the country who knows PFAS to do the same study I did, except she got funding for it and she did a much better job. She's an expert at PFAS Her name is Jennifer Field and she's at Oregon State and she did a marvelous job with this. And she actually looked at things I couldn't look for. She looked for the volatiles, which I don't have the equipment for. I was looking just for the presence and absence and I identified some of it, but I couldn't identify all of it. I didn't have enough money to do all the things and the good news is she reproduced the results we did, which means I wasn't wrong.
Speaker 1:That was a good thing.
Speaker 2:Well, I wish I was. I really do, but in this case it wasn't wrong. And in fact it was worse. There's more volatiles than people think, especially on that moisture barrier. That moisture barrier has a lot of off-gassing, and that's without a fire. Luckily, you guys don't go anywhere near fire, right? So it never gets warm right.
Speaker 2:So that's even more concerning than with our first paper. So, yes, those papers are out there. We now know it's peer reviewed, we've got lots of people that can reproduce it, and the IAFF did a really remarkable job of about 180 degree bout face. Ed Kelly apologized that I in person and said we were wrong to ignore you. This is serious and we got to do something. And he's led the charge ever since, and I think that's remarkable and the union can change like that, because it was just a matter of putting some material in front of them and saying look, and the companies that make the gear there's not a chemist among them, right, they'll just sew the gear together. They buy the textiles and sew it together. And then there's a company that makes the textiles, but they don't use the chemicals, they just buy the chemicals and add it to the textiles. So the manufacturer is three chains back.
Speaker 2:Nobody knew. And so when they said, though, we don't use BFASH in the gear, they were sincere. In many cases they didn't know. And then they said, no, you're using it. And they said, well, it doesn't come off. And I said, no, it does come off. Well, how do you know? Well, watch this, and we do that. Okay, yeah, it comes off. Well, we use the safe kind. There is no safe kind. So all these things are being said by people that don't know what a PFAS are, and so I go through all these arguments and then suddenly, well, what does that mean? It means that we've got something that isn't good for the first responder on their gear, and the answer to that is change the gear. And it's not going to be sudden, it's not going to drive any of these companies out of business. They're going to sell more gear, right, they're going to be in great shape, but they're going to sell without these chemicals.
Speaker 2:And then there's a backlog. Honestly, the companies can't respond quick enough. One of the companies, one of the textile manufacturers, read the social media tea leaves about. I told everybody I was doing this study. I did a year in advance. I went and visited all the gear makers, or at least their representative, and I said, look, this is what we're seeing, could it be? And they said, well, we use the safe stuff. No, no, this is the stuff you're using and it's not safe. And so it was a. You know, I did all these things and most of the manufacturers sort of said, well, hopefully it goes away. One of them actually said what's our plan B? And they came up with this material, which is now available, which is the outer shell, which is PFAS-free. And another company has recently come up, this year, came up with a moisture barrier that's PFAS-free.
Speaker 2:And I haven't tested that one yet, but that's a huge advance over what we have, and they're already starting.
Speaker 1:They developed that in that short of time.
Speaker 2:They said they'd been working on it for years. My paper just happened to beat them before they got to the in Atlanta and they didn't really have the motivation. Because even if they came up with a new one, why would people switch from the old one? Because this company's already got a huge market. So what they did is they had done some research on how to replace it, but it wasn't going to replace everything and there was no need for it. But when the paper hit and then suddenly IFF recognized and they did their own paper and said, oh, this is bad, then there was a real need to do this and so we had to change what the availability was of this material. Once it's available, you have a choice. Would you like the turnout gear with toxic chemicals or the turnout gear with?
Speaker 2:less toxic chemicals, and it's a pretty obvious choice, and I don't have anything against the gear manufacturers. I think they were. Everybody should do due diligence, that you know what you're making your stuff with, and if somebody comes and sell you, this is really good, but it contains asbestos. You might watch out. If so, you watch for things that are really good, but of course, you'd like your gear to be the best. For the first responder, we want the best, but there will be some unscrupulous companies that will make this chemical and say it's safe. No, it isn't safe and we shouldn't be using it in our foam, in our gear or anywhere else. And most of the companies have now quit. Well, 3M certainly backed out of it. This year they just paid $10 billion for poisoning the country's water supply, and that's B with a billion, I mean that's a lot of money, but they're still in business and they're hoping that that will stop the lawsuits for a while.
Speaker 1:Is that for the foam? The foam one, because I get that all the time through my social media, like if you've ever used AFF, but that's what that 10 billion went to.
Speaker 2:It went to clean up the, not the AFF. It's went to clean up the water supplies, provide alternate water supplies or clean up water supplies. Because where did that AFF go? If you ever had an incident where you used it before last year or two, you wash it off the street and so it's not slippery. And then it went into the ground or it went into the surface water and it went downstream and made a little bit of foam. But the foam was safe as soap, right? Well, guess what? It lasts? For a thousand years. It isn't safe and it starts building up and critters are in it and we eat the critters, or we eat the fish, or we put on the vegetables and we eat the vegetables.
Speaker 2:So it gets into us and we drink the water off and the water goes through a water treatment system, but it's not. It doesn't remove PFAS. We don't know how to remove it effectively. It can be removed by some filters, but it's expensive. So we're not doing that all water supplies yet and we don't have the money to do it. All water supplies. We gotta find some clever ways to clean it up, and so this is the long-term prospect. And firefighters right in the middle of it, lucky you. And the thing that the only thing that was bad was that nobody told you guys. I mean, if you're told right now that your gear has this toxic chemical on it, but you are going to go to a fire tomorrow, you need to wear your gear absolutely.
Speaker 2:Now it keeps you safe in a fire, and it does keep you safe. It's designed to do that, but it can be designed exactly the same way and FPA 1971 compliant and now be PFAS free. That's a win for everybody. It works as well. You're safe in a fire and when you take it home or you wash it with something else or you're wearing it all day, you're not getting a continual exposure to a chemical that we know causes cancer and other things. There's a. I got firefighters with ulcerative colitis and guess what that's? One of the diseases it causes is immune disease. There's hypertension. Well, that can come from stress. It can come from a lot of things, but you guys are luckily on a stressful job, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah right.
Speaker 2:And so and you know so you don't know where all these things come from. Can you say that PFAS causes this chemical? Did Paul Carter's cancer come from this chemical? We don't know that. We know that he was exposed to this chemical through his gear. We know he contracted cancer, as did many other firefighters do too. He survived it. He caught it early. Good for him. But it was a good note to all you listeners to get those checks as often as you can. I know you're young and invincible, but some of us.
Speaker 2:I'm including you in this. I don't know how old you are, but we're all Our pleasure of calling you young.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 2:I just had a mole removed on that ear. You can see that there's my show on tell for the day.
Speaker 1:You never know it's.
Speaker 2:hopefully it's a carousel number and not the melanoma, and it's a mole. That's why I've not shaved today for you, otherwise I'd shave, jake. But there you go.
Speaker 1:No, I want you to be nice and comfy for 3.5. Yeah, of course, stay on airs. Yeah, but anyway, so that's the trick, I'll go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt you.
Speaker 2:Not at all. I'm going on. I sort of gave you the whole Kitten and Caboodle at once and I'm trying to scare everybody, but I'm also trying to empower you to say look, you can do something about it. We need to switch the gear. It's going to take 10 years. So it's probably not going to affect the in-service firefighter today, but by the next generation they should be wearing PFAS for a year, and there'll still be locks of toxin out there. You still find fires. You still have risk. Every time you put that suit on you've got risk. But it's more important to think about that risk in the building than it is to think about am I God, am I getting it from my gear that I'm wearing? And so that's one risk we can do something about, and it doesn't cost anybody their job.
Speaker 2:Guess what? Dupont's going to make a little less money because they don't sell as much of this chemical. All the uniform makers will stay in business. All the textile manufacturers will stay in business, but they're going to change and that's going to cost them a little bit. Oh well, they're going to sell more gear at the end, and I think this is the way the free market works, and so we push it that way. There'll be regulations, there'll be lawsuits someday and things like that. I'm sure there's lawsuits now, but it's one of those things, that it's the fear of litigation that drives these things. The companies are going to do it out of the goodness of their heart and for fear of litigation.
Speaker 2:And it'll get done, and I think that's the way America works. We could try to regulate it. Like the Europeans, it'll take us 12 years to pass a law and then you'll have a day to get it done, and it'll take 10 years from there to change all the gear.
Speaker 2:So I think what we're doing now is the best we can do. I'm really happy that the firefighters don't shoot the messenger. They still invite me to talk sometimes, like you do. They never invite me back, I'll tell you that, but it's one of those things that people are listening. The fire services do have a good what we call a network, and it's social media network, whatever it happens to be. People talk to each other and people are talking about PFAS and I went to the FDIC last April and the first thing I saw I was gonna ask you about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I walked into the building and there's a parking garage with a three foot banner and it said it was an advertisement for steadfast and it said Florian Free Membrane Technology now available. It was their announcement three days before the meeting that they had invented a moisture, a Florian Free. So the first word I see in a firefighter conference is Florian Free. And I'm like wow, they really are talking about this and the company had done a really good job. They had done it by FDIC so they could announce it.
Speaker 2:It has to be checked out by everybody, of course, but they did some testing and they said it was flooring free and the test they did were good. So I suspect that it is flooring free. We'll test it ourselves in the next week or two and then we'll confirm it. But I mean, it's one of those things that once that gets available, then you can replace both inner and outer layer. And we're working with IFF as to how do you tell. But it's flooring free and so it's not clearly labeled. It's just you have the outer shell and the inner shell. Are they both flooring free or is it just one or both? And there'll be a few years of trying to tell it apart.
Speaker 2:But in the future we'll have a gear that works just as well as just as useful and functional as it is now, and safe. It has a reflective tape. That's where the real danger comes in right now, and so make sure that you have the gear is the same maker you have now, but it'll be flooring free and to that end, I'm proud of what I'm doing. I've stepped on a few toes, I'm sure, but I haven't done anything wrong. I haven't sent anybody's, I haven't lost anybody at their job and, in fact, what we hope is it's going to be safe for 10 years and it's an opportunity to fire services to take control of what they can control.
Speaker 2:You can control the gear. You have regulations on what it is, you have regulations on what it shouldn't be, and it can be done. The change of regulation will take years, but to have gear that's flooring free is already happening and that's a testament to the people that listened and said whoops, this is a problem, we're going to change it and I think you know. Once you know the risks, you can minimize them. And that's the beautiful part of your job, right? You go in and assess risks every day and you try to minimize them. So you had some questions. I should let you talk.
Speaker 1:No, yes, actually, thank you very much. So I want to first let me let me do a little summary song. I want to make sure I understood this. So, because of the A triple F, a million years ago not a million years ago, but years ago it's contaminated the water supply so bad that it's just gone into everything all around the world. It's in your waters and everything. So the best we could do now is try to minimize that, and so I'm processing so much what you said. And it's in our gear, it's in our outer gear, our shell and our moisture barrier. But at the same time as that gear rubs together over a period of time, it starts to transfer. It seems to be you told the story about the dust is easily transferable. Yeah, a couple of questions here. What can we do? You mentioned that it's the next generation firefighter that's going to be able to enjoy PFAS free gear across the board generally.
Speaker 2:What do you do now?
Speaker 1:What do we do now? You know what do we do now, like I have. When you said that about your students like touching the gear to do the test of, you know, getting on their hands I'm like man, I've had gear in my all over my training office and we're tearing it apart, cleaning it and doing all this stuff. So what can we do now to minimize our exposure to PFAS?
Speaker 2:Yep, it's a great question I get asked that a lot PFAS very good.
Speaker 1:Oh, look at that, I learned, you learned it. That's good.
Speaker 2:High points, high points, and so what I'm going to say is the policies have to come from the fire services. I can tell you how to run your life.
Speaker 2:They're not going to listen to me but, I can make some suggestions, and the suggestions come about where do you keep the gear, when do you wear it and how do you clean it? So the first question is if I get new gear, should I wash it? Absolutely, I mean, you should wash it according to instructions, according to manufacturer instructions. They're very specific, but washing it will remove loose PFAS from it for a while. Then you'll rub more off. But that's the first step. Second step is when you don't have to wear it, you shouldn't wear it, and that conflicts with many station policies. I want to be at least half dressed by the time the alarm goes off, if I've got to be on call in a rapid area.
Speaker 2:And every station, every chief is going to have a different policy on this. But are there cases where you respond? Well, there are two types. I mean, if you're on a response, you got to decide and that's a policy the fire services should make. If it's a response that it could be a flame in golf fire, you want to be on the scene prepared, not dressing there. It looks unprofessional to be dressing when you get there. I understand that. I understand the response time issue, so, but if you are out of service or not having to respond in seconds to a call, which is not often but I understand that we shouldn't be wearing it in the living quarters unless you need to keep it in a station area.
Speaker 2:Decon it as frequently as you can, or it's pretty required nowadays in most municipal areas to decon after fire Because you know those cancerous smoke particles and all the other things that come with them are there. Pretend it's there even before you started and then say, okay, we should wash this thing as often as we can without wearing it out. But they won't. But if you have an extractor at work and you haven't washed it in a while even they haven't been on a call it wouldn't be a bad idea to wash it more often. The guys here came up with ideas about you know where do you store it? Should the bins in which they're stored, where there's a lot of? There's often drying racks where these things dry after you've put them through the extractor. Those are often kept separate that they dry over here in this air blowing through it. Well, is that same air that you're breathing, like the diesel exhaust, or do you have some place that does that elsewhere? That's an engineering solution that may be a small thing.
Speaker 2:I have a guy who's a equipment specialist PPE specialist out of the big county in California and he does a lot of sewing and repairing so the gear gets back in shape without buying a whole new set, and he's in charge of outfitting 100, I think, 1500 firefighters, and so he has a lot of things like that. He said what about me? I mean I'm in here with a sewing machine and hundreds of these things hanging up and he says, you know, he makes most of the chiller all clean before he gets to him so he doesn't get the off-gassing. But he says what about the dust in my office? So he asked for a HEPA filter in his office. He asked for an extra air source and a HEPA filter and he got it. I mean a charge of money. And the chief didn't know anything about this, but he knew he was pretty damn insistent and he liked the guy, so he gave him an office away from where the gear was kept in one place, and he goes and works with the gear, but he puts his office out.
Speaker 2:It used to be, his office was right, with a gear all around him. Now he has a closet somewhere else that is not free from the gear, and this one with a gear has a HEPA filter that's continuously filtering the air to get rid of the dust, so that was an engineering solution.
Speaker 2:There are a couple of examples I'll also give, which are I see you guys all the time. We have a stadium here it's a Notre Dame stadium actually and the firefighter is like running up and down it to show that they're tough. And boy, they're tougher than I am. I go up that step and I'm huffing and puffing. These guys are in full gear, often carrying a hose or something weird, and they're going up and down the steps to show how many times they can do it. And I went to you know you have all the rookies trying to climb up a ladder or try to do something hard, and guess what they're wearing.
Speaker 1:All the gear.
Speaker 2:Yep, because it's heavy and you got to be able to do it in gear to be in a stripe. I think that's a great thing. It gets you in practice and shape and all sorts of good things. I would suggest, for the next five years we sort of 10 years we take a moratorium on the gear unless they can still huff and puff and test the cardiovascular steps with carrying heavy loads, no less. But they can do it without the gear on for a couple of years and that would reduce that exposure.
Speaker 2:It's an unnecessary exposure. Is it going to lead to cancer? Well, statistically yes, but you've got dozens of people doing it. What's the chance that it led to an increased exposure for you? I don't know, but I wouldn't want to. Those are things where you go into a show and tell, you have the school kids coming by. Yes, it's really good to look like a firefighter, but you wear your regular uniform. You still look pretty impressive, and so for a few years we're not going to have the gear worn to the library when you're doing a show and tell or elementary school when you're training. Of course, you've got to have the gear on. When you're in action in a fire situation, you've got to have the gear on.
Speaker 1:It keeps you safe Well that's one of the questions I had that somebody asked me when we first started having this conversation at my department and as a training officer, they came up to me and they said we need to limit the time we train in our gear. And that got me thinking. I'm like, yeah, we have to train, but do we have to do it? At this particular time we were doing live burns. That was like three hours. You were in your gear. Mostly you had some part of your gear on for three hours and I'm like you know what I can see cutting that in half and spreading out more days.
Speaker 1:And then it started me down a rabbit hole. I'm like I wonder if there's a recommendation out there. But after talking to you I can see why I could really find one, because right now the best practice is just minimize as best you can. Yeah, don't keep it to your point, don't keep them in gear to exercise. But if you're doing legitimate training and it requires all your gear, do that. But every opportunity we can to not have to wear it. I guess we really need to work on that for now.
Speaker 2:For us for this current generation.
Speaker 2:And don't forget that there are volunteers and there are full municipal firefighters, there are military firefighters they got rid of the silvers now, but they still wearing gear and then you have all sorts of mixtures in between. You have wildland and you have also, and the wildland gear is different and it really doesn't have to be fast most of the time. So, and then you have municipalities that you know. Inner city Boston is going to be a lot different than suburban south bend. It's going to be a lot different than the fire, the oil wells of Tulsa, oklahoma.
Speaker 2:Everybody's got different situations that they practice for the wildfires of California, I mean, and they all need to train in different ways and I think that one rule fits all is not going to happen, especially with. But you know they had a rule that everybody has to start wearing SCBA as soon as it became available, because they knew that was carcinogenic and that was more or less national and the rule be here, that will have PFAS free gear eventually and the meanwhile you do the best you can. You stay safe. That's the most important thing. So if you're in a fire exercise, even a live fire exercise or a real, actual fire, you want your gear and you got to have it on and you got to treat it seriously and you guys know all the reasons for that. So I'm not trying to upset any Apple cards there, just if we could keep separate from the gear. The volunteers shouldn't be taken at home Of course they have to, because there's no place to leave it, etc.
Speaker 2:So forth. What do we do the gear when we're done? Well, we often send it to fire academies so they can train in gear that they don't own yet.
Speaker 1:Oops.
Speaker 2:This is the old gear. It's probably shedding more. There's probably a lot of stuff on it. So welcome to fire academies, guys. We're going to douse up with chemicals, yeah let's start you up with your cancer path.
Speaker 2:So I'm not going to say don't do that. I mean it's, what else are you going to do? You're going to have to pay for more, it's going to be more costly and things like that. But maybe those guys get some of the newer gear. That would be, that would be humane.
Speaker 2:But there's a lot of you in service folks that have been waiting for lots of time and said, hey, I've been wearing this for 10 years, that's time to cut my, and that's honestly true too. So I mean, it's just, it's a bunch of policies. I don't want to say yes or no on any of them. I think anything that reduces your exposure would be the right thing. There is dust, so minimizing dust exposure is just common cleanliness. The decon has become a really changed a lot in the last 10 years, right? So they have these little tents that people can decon right beside the site and things like that. Sure, but you know this stuff is on the gear, so when you first put it on, you've got it on. So how do we, how do we minimize that exposure? I don't know.
Speaker 1:It doesn't have to be heated up, it doesn't have to be. I mean, it just has to. You just have to have any gear on current gear and you risk an exposure to to PFAS.
Speaker 2:Yep and it. I hope it's not significant. That's, jake, that's my sincere hope. I hope that the we can do a study in the future people are trying it to see how much comes from the gear and how much comes from the A triple F, and I hope that a triple F wins and the gear is only a minor component. But what if I'm wrong? What happens if it's? If it's more? I think the A triple F is a more serious source. God forbid that anybody's practice with the stuff and put it down the local drain, which we've all done.
Speaker 2:But, if that, if that happens, where does that go in my community? And is that part of the problem that my water utilities having getting clean water supply Oops, that's that's we know. There's a couple of places where that's happened already and I'd hate that. You know, and that means that you guys live in the community you serve, so you wouldn't poison your own water intentionally. You were just never told, and so that's, I think, where the realization comes in. We do the best we can with information given. Now we know something that we didn't know before. Is this one, is this one is addressable. We can change the gear, but, boy, that doesn't help you now.
Speaker 1:I look back on times when I was like, for in any state of Indiana, you have to do your hazmat awareness and ops to be a firefighter one or two. Well, that means you have to spray foam and practice a different ways to apply it. And I'm talking to you, I'm listening about, thinking about all the times that I've done this training and walking around in foam and it gets all over you anyway, and then just taking the tube out of the bucket to show people you know how they have the extruded.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and now you just got me thinking like, oh my God, so if we do okay, is there a regular blood test? Could you know Jake Barnes go to his doctor and say do a blood test, he'll pass his NB. And if so, what do we do if it's high?
Speaker 2:Very good, I got some good news for you. Well, mostly good news. The blood test used to have to be ordered by an MD.
Speaker 2:And then you'd have to go to phlebotomists. Luckily you got lots of them in your station and you grow the blood. Then you have to send it off with a script to a lab that would do the analysis. It cost 800 bucks for the lab to do. It Took six weeks and then the results would come back and somebody would have to read them to you because it has results. What does that mean? And so it was pretty useless. Very few people got it done because 800 bucks wasn't covered by insurance Friday and so it was only done when there was a known exposure.
Speaker 2:And so, fast forward to last year, urethanes USA came up with a capillary test, not a venous draw, and so it's a pin prick and you put a drop of blood on a card and you send them the card and then wait six weeks. You'll get the answer back, and their reports have gotten a lot better. It's actually quite legible. You have this much of this and this much of this, and this is what the limit of detection was, which means the limit of detection is one. We have 50 parts per trillion and you see one part per billion in your blood, or you see two parts or five parts or 12. And they have each of them individually listed. So you have to go through and count them all up to see whether that adds up to but the sum of most people have four of one and four of PFOS and one of PFOS in their blood in North America, and then point one and point two of all the others, and so that's a pretty common metric. And then you compare yours to that and you can say gee, I'm not elevator, I'm elevated. So that has become $300 test. It's still not covered by insurance. But if you can convince your township or your utility or your employer that, wouldn't it be best to screen for health effects if you knew what to look for?
Speaker 2:And so a very clever fire department chief in South Bend managed to get the city of South Bend to test his firefighters because he wanted to make sure they could do some sort of pre-screening for cancers and stuff like that, because a stage one cancer is less costly to the city than a stage four cancer and in reality to his brothers. He was thinking a stage one is a hell of a lot better to deal with than stage four and so but he uses the cost benefit. When he went and asked for the money for it. And they gave him money because he said, oh, in the long term it'll save us money, yeah, we don't have to do that, that's for good. And then to the people he serves, he's like we got this testing, we got to do it and that's not widely spread. We have our first state legislator, also from South Bend, who's in Indiana has got 1000 firefighters being tested a year now, which is better than zero.
Speaker 2:And she got state funding to do a thousand tests. And what happens with the results? Now we get the results back and we'll see whether they're elevated or not. We'll see some people higher than others. We'll ask what they do. We'll also say, gee, if you have a high level, what do you do about it? There's not a lot you can do. It's gonna come out of your blood slowly but as you lose red blood cells and that's not a high turnover for a male, it's a little quicker for a female, for obvious reasons, but it can also. So that does come out of females quicker, but they're also got different types of cancers and we're not looking for female cancers. Fire service is so male that we're typically looking at male cancers. Okay, so we need to be looking for indicators of cancer early. That's something you can do. So Gaya was up at 1700 or 1600 or what? 1600, I think it was his level, I mean that was a special case.
Speaker 2:They did some medical intervention and they tried to basically remove his blood. They did some, they took some. Donate blood and don't put it to the blood bank but destroy it. I mean that would reduce your blood counts and that's a pretty serious medical intervention. You take a, you donate blood regularly anyway, but if you take your blood out and you know you have high PFAS, don't give it to the blood bank. Discard it and just generate new blood and your PFAS levels will come down with successive generations of blood.
Speaker 1:But even with that, you'd mentioned that all the blood pretty much has PFAS in it. So but he's, he's going from 1600, hopefully down to five, right, yeah?
Speaker 2:well, we would like to get him there and I don't know the outcome of that story. It was a couple of years ago when I heard the story and it was a remarkable story but it's I'm sure they I heard they intervened. They put him on some medicines as well, some blood thinners, I think the try and reduce it. I don't know if that's therapy worked, but somebody seemed to think it would. But those are more dangerous drugs I'm trying to avoid. It sounds like bloodletting. We did that in the 1200s, right?
Speaker 1:But they were on to something.
Speaker 2:They certainly were. I mean, if you are have a toxin in the blood, getting your blood to resupply and a healthy adult can generate you know a couple liters of blood a month, or whatever it is. I think that would be you know, but you want to be careful because you're also going to get lightheaded after you donate a pint of blood.
Speaker 2:So, you want to drink some orange juice and make sure you're not going straight to work on shift, then that type of stuff. But you can recover in a couple of days from donating a pint of blood and I think most of you people do, as I'm sure many firefighters donate willingly to the blood banks, which is critically short. You need to, but what I would do is, if you come back with a high PFAS level maybe, don't donate that blood to the blood bank, but still draw it and just discard it and that's sort of a self remedy. Don't tell any doctors you're not doing this, but they should certify that you're of good enough health to be able to lose a pint of blood every now and then.
Speaker 2:But, that would be. That's sort of a mechanical way of doing it. But geez, I'm not an MD so I'm not going to recommend that, but I think it's one of those. This is one of the things you could explore with an MD and say, look, how do I get these levels down? And well, it's 20, really dangerous.
Speaker 2:Well, we know that for every doubling of the number that we see in the blood, the immune system you know it only drops by a half as well. So they did this study on vaccine effectiveness in school children and every time they doubled the blood concentration of PFAS. Just, they didn't. The students just came in, some with high, some with low, and the high ones had less immune response to the vaccines they were given. And so applying that wide really says that these are immunotoxins and you don't really want them in your blood. So those are the sort of things why we want to do that Before anybody takes drastic action.
Speaker 2:If it's just, if you double the national average, oh well, that's what we sort of live with and it'll come back down in a few years. If you know you've handled a triple F a lot military firefighters have in particular then they will probably be more elevated than that. I've known several people with high elevations, but there are people living up in Grand Rapids, never being a firefighter in their life, that have really high levels too, because they lived on a contaminated water supply.
Speaker 1:So what was the name of that company that you do the $300 test?
Speaker 2:It's a commercial lab called URFIN's USA, so E-U-R-O-F-I-N-S USA, and that's the USA branch of this multinational testing corporation and they developed it. I know the guy who developed it there and he's very good, and so they charge. You can sign up online and for pay $300, they'll send you a kit and it has instructions how to pick your finger, send the card and send it back. They do a bunch of blood tests that way these days a capillary pin trick. This is pretty accurate, I hear. I think they do a pretty good job on it.
Speaker 1:I want to look into that. I mean, right now we have to have some kind of we have to have some kind of control of what we're in, right and so having being able to control our exposure, getting our regular checkups, we know what types of cancers in the fire service seem to prosper more than any other place. So we have to start, we have to make sure we have a good relationship with our doctor, go to get our physicals as much as much as we can, looking at these other alternatives, like you just mentioned, with the test, although I'd rather spend $800 because it's just, I got that kind of money. I can do that. I don't want to brag, I don't want to flex, but I kind of pulled it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, 76 last year.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of money now. I really appreciate your time on here today, sir.
Speaker 2:No, thank you for the opportunity.
Speaker 1:No, I really. I want to help get the message out that we need to be aware of this. There are things we can do. It's not doom and gloom. There are things that we can take control of right now, and that's I was a little worried that I was going to get a doom and gloom vibe by the end of this, simply because I'm really nervous about this stuff, but I don't. I really. I feel better. There's knowledge, there's power in just the knowledge, knowing that it's there Exactly.
Speaker 1:And what we can do before I go, though I do, I remember one more thing about you. I told you about my wife. She said I gave you that before you sell this. Well, actually I forgot to tie it in on the third piece. There is a fire chief in Hanover.
Speaker 1:It's a friend of mine, chris Hubbard. Many months ago he sent me the where you talked to an FDIC. He said, hey, this would be a great guy for your podcast. So I think a lot of Chris, and always you know, but somehow I just kind of lost that. So when my wife told me, reminded me what an idiot I was, and that she's already telling me that stuff, it got me thinking and I remember I found Chris's text and it was you right. So it was the Holy Trinity. You know my boss's wife and then you know Chris, and then finding on the internet this, this was meant to happen. So I appreciate your time, I appreciate the information and I will say this I want to come back. You said nobody asked you back. I'm going to ask you back because I want to see, in the next six months to a year, where we're at in the fire service with PFAS, based on what you can do, because you're doing more studies. You're doing more, you're learning more stuff, so I definitely want to have you come back.
Speaker 2:Yep, we are definitely going off to a few other things which will be vendors of the fire services. So we'll, we'll let you know when we have that, and sure I'll be happy to.
Speaker 1:If you can rule out beer having it. That'd be great If you could just go into a test and just do that.
Speaker 2:Now that my knowledge scotch is all fine.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:There's always a plan B, brother. There you go.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for your time, doctor.
Speaker 2:Take care.
Speaker 1:It's been an absolute thrill. Thank you so much, sir.
Speaker 2:Take care Thank you.
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