When I hear talking about forever chemicals, they are usually described as “chemicals are not affected by naturally occurring reactions, and that accumulate in the bodies of living beings”. By accumulating, they cause all sorts of health issues.
What I don’t understand is how they cause these health issues. If these chemicals do not participate in regular reactions, how do they cause issues?
I am not claiming that the research in the subject is wrong, I am missing the link between “these things don’t react with anything” and “these things still cause all sorts of health problems”.
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I think one real risks is the bioaccumulation and biomagnification as the forever chemicals move up through the foodchains.
They might be completely safe at the level that everyone’s exposed to right now, but the issue with never going away is that the exposure levels will only keep going up.
Look at the case of the pesticide DDT in the USA. DDT is very safe (to most non-insects) at low levels, but it takes a very long time to break down.
What ended up happening is that the DDT sprayed on crops and farms would go into runoff or rodents and work it’s way into the ecosystem and start moving up the food chain. DDT accumulates in the bodies of fish and mice in normal levels, but animals higher in the food chain would consume dozens of these prey animals and it would start accumulating in higher levels in those animals.
In the case of DDT it was discovered that it was weakening the eggshells of Bald Eagles, and it nearly brought the animal to extinction.
Luckily, we were able to ban DDT in time, and it slowly broke down in the environment before the Bald Eagle went extinct, but a ‘forever chemical’ won’t be as easy to recover from.
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