Talk:Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances

Biased Source

Echoing the previous comment, the page provides a Table titled "Probable links to health issues as identified by the C8 Science Panel." The Table lists position papers that did not meet the quality standards for publication in a reputable peer-reviewed scientific journal, and thus were self-published by C8SciencePanel.org. C8SciencePanel.org is registered anonymously, but appears to be owned by a plaintiff's law firm with a financial interest in PFAS litigation. Wikipedia's editorial standards say that content "must be verifiable." The C8SciencePanel.org position papers are not verifiable. That Table should be deleted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.113.212.40 (talk • contribs) 21:15, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

That table was removed a while ago. --Leyo 22:17, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Vague tag-ism?

I strongly disagree with the necessity of hanging a "vague" tag on the sentence: Hypothyroidism is the most common thyroid abnormality associated with[vague] PFAS exposure. ...especially, as a citation reference is given for that sentence. The entire point of the article is that there are undetermined correlations without established causality or mechanism; connections have been documented without the exact nature of them being known. This, necessarily, falls into the territory of "vagueness". Therefore, there is no reason to cast doubt upon a simple, self-evident statement (one which has a reference) by hanging a "vague" tag on it. Discussion? rowley (talk) 04:04, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

These tags have been added by Beland. It seems to me that he is not an expert in the fields of epidemiology or medicine. --Leyo 09:23, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

@Leyo: I don't think it's particularly required to be a medical expert in order to point out a phrase that is not clear to a general audience, but I do actually have a science background. Thanks for pointing out this thread, but it would be helpful to direct your comments to the merits of the text, rather than other editors. @Jmrowland: I don't have access to the referenced article, so I can't clarify whether the association is based on epidemiology that indicates a statistical correlation that may or may not indicate causation, medical studies that were testing PFOS as a treatment, or case reports from people who had just been accidentally exposed or something. "Significant" is also vague and subjective, so it's better to "show not tell" and give the actual number. Something like this would be less vague: "Epidemiological studies find the opposite response in humans; an exposure of X is statistically correlated with a Y increase in total cholesterol and a Z increase in LDL cholesterol." The rest of that sentence seems to assume that the relationship is causal, rather than allowing that correlation does not prove causation and saying something like: "If PFOS exposure actually causes higher cholesterol, this would indicate..." -- Beland (talk) 23:07, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, but my issue is with the wording, not the research. "Hypothyroidism is the most common thyroid abnormality associated with PFAS exposure" is not an especially vague statement. rowley (talk) 22:39, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

There is only one vague tag remaining (in section Hypercholesterolemia). Do you have access to the full text of doi:10.1080/10408440802209804 to check and to come up with a suggestion for rephrasing the sentence? --Leyo 13:44, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Why no concentration (or level) values for effects ?

One thing that struck me in this article, nowhere does it say that:

Х negative effect is observed to manifest in humans at (roughly) Y concentration of Z substance in a Q medium

or

Х negative effect is observed to manifest with F frequency at (roughly) Y concentration of Z substance in a Q medium

and without that... It is just empty words, just saying PFAS are bad. Come on, give the quantities! (or did i miss that in the article?) 45.94.119.246 (talk) 09:58, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

How shall this be done for a class of several thousand chemicals that don't have the same relative potency factors? Just adding them up won't work. --Leyo 20:08, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Equity in Occupational Health

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 March 2023 and 25 July 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): CapstoneEditor1 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by JMgeorgetown (talk) 21:20, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Error in diagram?

The diagram under Health and Environmental Concerns, which appears to be an original creation for this article (based on information from the five citations in the caption), has "low sperm count and mobility" pointing towards the pregnant woman. Mistake, or just an odd choice (pointing to the fetus because it relates to reproductive health)? Or is it saying that children exposed in the womb grow up to have low sperm counts? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.120.15.219 (talk) 20:54, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

The low sperm count and mobility affect the reproduction. Pointing towards the fetus is okay IMHO. --Leyo 12:44, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 24 May 2023

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. (closed by non-admin page mover) CLYDE ^{TALK TO ME}/_{STUFF DONE} (please mention me on reply) 18:02, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

---

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances → PFAS – Per WP:COMMONNAME, the full length chemical name is unknown by virtually everyone. PhotographyEdits (talk) 10:45, 24 May 2023 (UTC) — Relisting. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 14:51, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

• Support. More recognizable than the long form, and incorporates both of them. Dekimasuよ! 11:15, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  Comment: This user is obviously not familiar with the topic. --Leyo 19:59, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  @Leyo please refrain from personal attacks regarding the knowledge of a particular editor on the topic. PhotographyEdits (talk) 07:04, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  This is certainly not an "attack", just a remark. Opinions of people who are knowledgeable about a subject are generally more relevant. Personally, I don't participate in discussions on matters I don't know well. --Leyo 13:28, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• Strong oppose for several reasons:
  • It is against long-standing practice to use the acronyms of classes of chemical compounds instead of the full name. Examples:
    • Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, not PAHs (redirect)
    • Polychlorinated dibenzodioxins, not PCDDs (redirect)
    • Polychlorinated dibenzofurans, not PCDFs (redirect)
    • Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, not PBDEs (redirect)
    • Volatile organic compound, not VOCs (redirect)

  Any user/reader who is interested in the topic, easily finds the article via the redirects PFASs and PFAS.

  • This case is not really covered by WP:COMMONNAME. Also the example, i.e. Aspirin, is totally different from this request here.
  • The OECD and other multinational organizations use the full name.
  • The fact that the full name of a chemical class is unknown to a user who is mainly interested in computers, security, politics and history, is not a valid reason either.

--Leyo 19:38, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

PFAS has one big difference from all the other chemicals that you listed: it has been a big theme both in the media and in politics in recent years, which makes it mostly a subject of interest to non-chemists too. The purpose of an article topic is also giving the user reassurance that they ended up on the right page. Wether a particular organization like the OECD uses a term is irrelevant, we have to check that with a wide variety of reliable sources. Also, don't attack me on my possible knowledege on the subject. On top of that, I don't mean only myself, but the general public, which is the audience of Wikipedia in the end. PhotographyEdits (talk) 04:39, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Also other substance classes have also been a big theme both in the media and in politics. We even have several articles highlighting this. Examples include Warren County PCB Landfill, Housatonic River#PCBs, Sawins Pond#Boston Edison/NSTAR and PCBs, Dioxin contamination in Times Beach, Missouri, Pollution of the Hudson River, Inochi No Chikyuu: Dioxin No Natsu, Krupa, Semič, Seveso disaster, Pollution in Door County, Wisconsin#Bioaccumulation, Lighter than Orange – The Legacy of Dioxin in Vietnam, U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin, …

I mentioned the OECD because they have recently re-defined which substances are PFASs.

Concerning "giving the user reassurance that they ended up on the right page": The acronym is given in the redirect note and in the first sentence (in bold). For non-chemist users, the risk that they would mistake PFAS with PFOS, PFSA, PFOA etc. would increase, if the acronyms were used as title of the articles. --Leyo 08:19, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Those other examples are not well known chemicals for the general population. Other "pop" chemicals that have long and complex names (like drugs) use the short and WP:COMMONNAME acronym: e.g. MDMA, LSD. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 10:37, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

This is not true. Dioxins and PCBs, for example, are quite well known in the general population. --Leyo 13:28, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

PFAS really is an order of magnitude more known these days. PhotographyEdits (talk) 13:39, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose Redirects are cheap, so should of course exist for PFAS. However, the existing name is more revealing of what the article is actually about. Note that there is a more general discussion currently, at WT:WikiProject_Chemicals#Organofluorine_article_titles Pinging @Mdewman6 and Smokefoot: who contributed there. Mike Turnbull (talk) 16:28, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Chemistry has been notified of this discussion. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 14:52, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

• Comment The relevant MOS guideline here is WP:NCA, which suggests that if readers somewhat familiar with the subject are likely to only recognise the name by its acronym, then the acronym should be used as a title. As a chemist, I know that PFAS relates to polyfluorinated substances, but honestly was not aware the full formal name relating to the acronym was "Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance". So, the naming convention guideline seems to weight in support of using the acronym as the title, since that is what most people recognize as the title of the subject. That said, these are taken on a case by case basis and consensus can explicitly reject use of the acronym (e.g. Central Intelligence Agency instead of CIA, the example given at WP:NCA). I agree with Leyo that similar classes of chemical contaminants have traditionally not used acronyms/initialisms for article titles, suggesting we should not here, per WP:TITLECON. I am currently on the fence about which consideration should carry more weight. And as Mike Turnbull points out, regardless of outcome here, the general issue of how we handle the titles of our various articles on classes of organofluorine compounds needs some consideration in the linked discussion, given the overlapping content and potentially ambiguous terminology. Mdewman6 (talk) 19:16, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

  There is no harm in readers seeing the full name when they reach the article via PFASs. That way, they are more likely to remember the full name (which provides the definition). --Leyo 20:56, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't think that's much of a consideration, because they will either see it as the title of the page (if redirected from PFAS, as is the case currently) or will see it first thing in the lede in bold font, since per the MOS articles with acronyms are written out in the lede. The pertinent question is what is the best title per WP:CRITERIA and naming conventions. Mdewman6 (talk) 21:02, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

"PFAS(s)" is sometimes also used as an acronym for "perfluoroalkyl substances" (see e.g. recent Nature paper) or "polyfluoroalkyl substances" (see e.g. Duke University or recent review paper) only. Hence, keeping "Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances" makes the scope clear. --Leyo 21:28, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Let's be realistic, users barely use the Wikipedia search box. They use Google, which redirects them to this article and only shows them the full title. PhotographyEdits (talk) 09:35, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose, per Leyo's observation above, about scope. Otherwise, this a frustratingly dead-even fight between WP:CONSISTENT and WP:RECOGNIZABLE, two sections of the same policy. It's inevitable that in a handful of cases such a policy conflict will arise over an article title, and in this one we have a scope-clarity argument to settle it. Also, the citation to WP:NCA left out something important: "in contrast, consensus has rejected moving Central Intelligence Agency to its acronym, in view of arguments that the full name is used in professional and academic publications"; thus the mention above that "The OECD and other multinational organizations use the full name" was not irrelevant, as PhotographyEdits said it was. Furthermore, WP:NCA is just a rather tedious explication of a narrow application of WP:RECOGNIZABLE, so I don't think it really adds any weight to one side of the argument. (Incidentally, it also actually has no business at all being in MoS, which is not a naming-conventions guideline. If today you tried to add new naming-convention guidance to an MoS page, you'd be shouted out of the room. If that passage actually has consensus at all, it should be moved into a naming-conventions guideline, probably WP:NCCAPS, as a section, or to its own NG page. We do regularly apply MoS principles to article titles, but what differentiates MoS from the NG pages is the latter are titles-specific, and the former are general and are written to pertain to article content; that they sometimes apply to titles also is entirely secondary.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:29, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
• Strong support per Mdewman6. The average user will simply be confused here. I don't see the validity of the "scope" arguments. The first sentence would state clearly the scope of the article: Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs). Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 19:34, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  The first sentence of reads Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable The content in articles in Wikipedia should be written as far as possible for the widest possible general audience. Indeed, we should strive for the content to become more understandable for a general audience (suggestions are welcome). However, this does not involve the title. --Leyo 19:55, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  Sure but WP:COMMONNAME follows the same spirit. We have Aspirin, not Acetylsalicylic acid. MDMA not 3,4-Methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine. The list goes on. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 22:20, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  Those are individual substances, not classes of substances. Hence, we can't really compare the cases.

  Another very important point can be seen at #Why no concentration (or level) values for effects ?: Even now, with the full and accurate title, some people confuse them for an individual substance are not aware that PFASs are a large and very diverse class of chemicals. It covers, i.e., both non-polymers and polymers. Obviously they are totally different in terms of toxicological effects. Moving the article to the acronym would increase the probability of misunderstanding a lot. --Leyo 13:28, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Appropriate language?

I'm far from an experienced editor, but I have a concern that there are parts of this article that read like a polemic. Just one particularly egregious (and not particularly well-written) example - "Chemical corporations that produce PFAS pocket approximately an annual $4 billion in profits from the production of this chemical but they impose monumental costs on tax payers and the health of the planet's population."

Is this appropriate? Hank Stamper (talk) 08:06, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Are you concerned about "pocket" and "monumental"? The former might be replaced by "make" or "generate", the latter by the actual (estimated) number. --Leyo 13:26, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Changed "pocket" to "generate" in the mean time. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 21:44, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Estimated Contemporary Costs section provides outrageous figure

Any claim that PFAS "costs" the world economy 17.5 trillion dollars annually is patently absurd. Such an estimate might be fit for the worst-case scenarios associated with unmitigated climate change. I believe this section should be deleted, or at least the source of this figure should be removed. Rsfadia (talk) 20:12, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

The analysis broke down societal costs into four categories. Soil and water remediation are the most expensive, followed by healthcare costs and bio-monitoring of PFAS pollution. Remediation of contaminated soil and water is indeed known to be very expensive. --Leyo 13:17, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

We wish climate change would cost us "only" 17.5 trillion... try an extra order of magnitude [1] {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 21:40, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Will it cost us 17.5T annually? And, even if it does, there is no way PFASs are such an extreme detriment to the world. 20% of world GDP? Rsfadia (talk) 01:25, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Expensive as remediation may be, there is no way this figure passes the smell test. If someone argued that all of fossil fuel use, including extraction in ocean wells and fracking from the ground, including health impacts to us and the environment, costs society 17.5T in damages annually, perhaps I'd understand.

Given that this this number is from one relatively small NGO that seems laser focused on PFAS regulation (not without reason), I'd argue that this is not an unbiased source. The Guardian article being cited feels like a rewrite of a ChemSec press release, with no one interviewed except for ChemSec employees. Rsfadia (talk) 01:42, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Inclined to Agree here. Summing up semi-acknowledged and fully acknowledged (thereby not necessarily correct by any means and faults surely overestimations by NGOs in line with shadow reporting culture, and underestimating/overestimating by Gov Agencies with special interests. In my totally irrelevant field we found that adding up numbers for fatalities globally, as they are reported (ca 2019) and used in fundraising, priority setting, policy shaping and science orientation we all have to die approximately 1,42 times. That’s not very helpful and a very smart colleague posits a theorem that we in fact only die once (population level). In effect, if so then that holds no matter what the aggregates sum up to. If the same is indeed applicable here, then we may have a systemic problem going in a multitude of globally critical academic fields that is kind of urgent to address. Lay-man understanding of the sciences and a fair grasp of my own immediate reality is that radical transformative action to correct for threats that are based in extremely faulty underlying premises (like +42% over theoretical max in my admittedly limited scope) may be spot on though that’s unlikely. But, even in such a lucky outcome scenario, then overdone and at the expense of the ‘opportunity cost’ (for lack of knowledge of more precise terminology) of also lessening resources and attention bandwidth available to simultaneously address other global issues also of paramount importance. IMHO Making arguments for policy based on simple truth-telling seems like a naïve but perhaps nifty way to begin to address this problem. Partly self regulating too as the instant the total hits 103,7% everyone knows somewhere something is off. Back to the drawing board for all claiming a percentage to hash it out amongst themselves till they reach a nice 100% benchmark consensus. That is of course provided I’m on to something here that even exists at all as an issue, and is a problem rather than a feature also for the special interest groups engaging. 85.230.186.119 (talk) 01:01, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Special:Diff/1179060477

@Bon courage: Would you be happy with the reference used in Gestational hypertension#cite_ref-Lo2013_4-0? Leyo 19:37, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

PMID:23403779 is a reasonable, but old, source in a changing field. What use should I be happy for? Bon courage (talk) 19:41, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Have you got a newer publication that is acceptable? If not, the one above should be sufficient to revert your removal. --Leyo 19:54, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Huh? That's not making sense. Could you say clearly in plain English what you want to do exactly? Bon courage (talk) 19:56, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Typo fixed. Hence, you may now respond to the content. --Leyo 21:29, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

I noticed that you have now removed the remaining parts of the section Pregnancy-induced hypertension and pre-eclampsia. The following review articles might be helpful to draft a short section on that matter:

• Considering environmental exposures to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) as risk factors for hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, doi:10.1016/j.envres.2021.111113
• Risk to human health related to the presence of perfluoroalkyl substances in food, doi:10.2903/j.efsa.2020.6223

--Leyo 22:40, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Professional ski wax technicians

This section was removed with the inappropriate comment "rmv. garbage". There are two 2023 review articles that cover at least major parts of the content:

• Occupational exposure and serum levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): A review, doi:10.1002/ajim.23454
• Occupational exposures to airborne per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)—A review, doi:10.1002/ajim.23461

Leyo 19:59, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

If you want to insert non-garbage-content, go ahead. But don't criticise legitimate cleanup of garbage sources (as you have before), as it's disruptive. Bon courage (talk) 20:06, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

I wasn't aware that Environmental Science & Technology is a garbage journal … It's not a review article, but garbage?! --Leyo 21:29, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

The problem isn't the journal, it's Wikipedia content sourced to unreliable sources. Bon courage (talk) 01:35, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Do you refer to WP:Primary sources? --Leyo 21:41, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Non-WP:MEDRS for WP:BMI. Bon courage (talk) 00:35, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Corporate and federal government suppression of information

I have reintroduced a paragraph in this section [2] improving some content that had been removed in the past [3]. @Bon courage I see you reverted it simply stating "Primary sourcing". What do you mean exactly? The source is a high quality source as far as I can tell https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10237242/ and the sourcing should be appropriate per WP:MEDRS for that kind of information. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 19:40, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The publisher categorize this as an "Original Article", but PUBMED has it as a review. On inspection, it's a composite of both. So, the question is: is the cited material WP:SECONDARY in nature? Bon courage (talk) 19:47, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Of course: "It contains analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources". In this case the primary sources are the historical documents that they reviewed. It was published in a peer reviewed journal and is on PUBMED. So it is a reliable secondary source per WP:SECONDARY. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 19:54, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

They also "developed deductive codes to assess industry influence". And this "development" is original work (primary research). The review element pertains to determining document dating, so far as I can see. Bon courage (talk) 20:00, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The fact that a "novel" categorisation was used to classify the primary documents definitely does not make this a WP:PRIMARY source. The "deductive codes" refer to the categories they used to categorise the documents: Drawing on the work of Bero and White [37], we deduced six codes from the cross-industry strategies of manipulation that researchers previously established to see whether the same practices emerge among the PFAS industry.. The codes were for example: “manipulation of the research question to obtain predetermined results; funding and publishing research that supports industry interests; suppressing unfavorable research; distorting the public discourse about research; changing or setting scientific standards to serve corporate interests;" etc. They then used those codes to simply tag the documents they were reviewing to categorise them: We then analyzed the documents, coding for each of these strategies. This falls well within the scope of WP:SECONDARY. If you don't have further concerns would you self-revert? {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 20:21, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Bits are primary and bits are secondary, as for many sources. However looking with that in mind the bits you added seem to be secondary, so there is not an issue. Bon courage (talk) 20:25, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the self-revert. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 20:34, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Bloomberg Investigates

A new documentary that was released a few days ago may be considered to be mentioned in the article: The Forever Chemical Scandal | Bloomberg Investigates 77.58.7.44 (talk) 21:26, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Bioaccumulation and biomagnification

In my view, this addition would need to be condensed considerably. The text includes general information on bioaccumulation and biomagnification. --Leyo 22:54, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, we prefer wikilinks to concepts like bioaccumulation and biomagnification. I don´t understand why the review (Houde M, Martin JW, Letcher RJ, Solomon KR, Muir DC (June 2006). "Biological monitoring of polyfluoroalkyl substances: A review". Environmental Science & Technology. 40 (11): 3463–3473) was removed; secondary sources are generally preferred in wp. Feel free to condense the text. JimRenge (talk) 08:49, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: College Composition II

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 16 January 2024 and 25 April 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): GregRR1 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by GregRR1 (talk) 21:10, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Merge "Economic role" and "Estimated contemporary costs"?

The sections "Economic role" and "Estimated contemporary costs" partly cover the same topic. What about merging the contents in a section called "Socio-economic role"? 195.176.112.14 (talk) 20:14, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Presence in Fertilizer

Which section does this go under? ‘This is Chernobyl’: Texas ranchers say ‘forever chemicals’ in waste-based fertilizers ruined their land Hcobb (talk) 18:49, 30 April 2024 (UTC)