A Little Too Slick?

Teflon, DuPont’s magical stuff that keeps frying pans from sticking and does lots of other things, is in trouble with the federal government. The fuss started with neighbors of a West Virginia plant where the big chemical company has been making Teflon for 50 years. They are suing DuPont on grounds that the operations near Parkersburg have been contaminating water supplies in West Virginia and Ohio with the chemical perfluorooctanoic acid, or C8 for short. The class-action suit charges that the company knew for many years that C8 harms humans but concealed the knowledge.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency filed a complaint early last month charging that DuPont withheld evidence if its own concerns about the chemical’s health and environmental impact. The company says it has complied with reporting requirements and has promised a formal response. If found guilty of violating federal law for two decades, it could be fined as much as $300 million.

C8 is a detergent-like chemical that doesn’t break down in the environment or in the human body. It can be found in the bloodstream of 90 percent of Americans, according to a study in the 1990s by the 3M Co., then DuPont’s main supplier. DuPont took over the manufacture of C8 when 3M quit in 2000.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a preliminary risk report last spring calling C8 a possible carcinogen but not advising consumers to stop using Teflon products. The Chinese government on July 8 began its own study of the safety of Teflon, according to the China Daily newspaper. Some Chinese stores took Teflon products off their shelves.

One of the findings the EPA says DuPont concealed was from a DuPont study in the 1980s of female workers exposed to the substance. It found that two out of seven women gave birth to babies with facial defects like the offspring of rats that had been exposed to C8 in another study.

C8 is not a legally controlled substance, but the Toxic Substances Control Act requires a company to report to the EPA any finding that a substance may be harmful. The agency said the company also violated another law that required it to comply with a 1997 agency request for all the toxicological data it had gathered about the chemical.

Among documents forced out by the West Virginia lawsuit were internal company memos. One said, “Our story is not a good one.” Another warned company officials to “keep this issue out of the press as much as possible.”

There remains a continuing question of whether this pervasive chemical does in fact pose a threat to public health. The public has a right to know, and to know promptly, whether it can trust those lovely Teflon-coated baking and frying pans. The EPA, has opened the case. It now must give us a satisfying answer to the safety question.