Study: Asian Americans more vulnerable to "forever" chemicals

Asian Americans have significantly higher exposure than other ethnic or racial groups to PFAS, a family of thousands of synthetic chemicals also known as “toxic forever” chemicals, Mount Sinai-led researchers report.

Scientists have linked exposure to these long-lasting compounds to many illnesses, including thyroid disease, kidney cancer and testicular cancer.

 in everyday life, and these exposures carry potentially adverse health impacts, according to the study published Thursday in Environmental Science and Technology, in the special issue “Data Science for Advancing Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology.”

“We found that if we used a customized burden scoring approach, we could uncoverlead author Shelley Liu, an associate professor of population health science at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, said in a statement.

“These disparities are hidden if we use a one-size-fits-all approach to quantifying everyone’s exposure burden. In order to advance precision environmental health, we need to optimally and equitably quantify exposure burden to PFAS mixtures, to ensure that our exposure burden metric used are fair and informative for all people.”

PFAS pollution is a major health concern, and nearly all Americans have detectable levels of PFAS chemicals in their blood. PFAS are hard to avoid. They are found in products that resist heat, oil, stains, grease, and water. 

 

The scientists estimated a person’s total exposure burden to PFAS and accounted for the exposure heterogeneity (for example, different diets and behaviors) of different groups of people that could expose them to different sets of PFAS. They found that Asian Americans had a significantly high PFAS exposure than all other US ethnic or racial groups, and that the median exposure score for Asian Americans was 89% higher than for non-Hispanic whites.

PFAS are hard to avoid. They are found in many types of outdoor clothing, camping gear, coated papers for fast-food takeout, firefighting foams and nonstick cookware. Most recently,PFAs were found in toilet paper, dental floss, semiconductors and solar panels.

This is the first time that researchers accounted for complex exposure sources of different groups of people to calculate a person’s exposure burden to PFAS.

This research suggests that biomonitoring and risk assessment should consider an exposure metric that takes into consideration the fact that different groups of people are exposed to many different sources and patterns of PFAS. Based on these findings, these researches believe that exposure sources, such as dietary sources and occupational exposure, may underlie the disparities in exposure burden.

The Biden administration has allocated $9 billion to PFAS clean-up, and in March 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed the first enforceable federal standards to regulate PFAS contamination in public drinking water.

The study didn't identify specific reasons as to why Asian Americans might have greater PFA exbosure in comparison to other ethnic and racial groups, researchers stressed that this is a topic to needs to be explored further.

In the future, the researchers plan to incorporate toxicity information on each PFAS chemical into exposure burden scoring, to further evaluate disparities in toxicity-informed exposure burden in vulnerable groups and population subgroups.

“In order to advance precision environmental health, we need to optimally and equitably quantify exposure burden to PFAS mixtures, to ensure that our exposure burden metrics used are fair and informative for all people,” Liu said.

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