Tune in as our executive editor Suzanne Boothby talks with the authors of the recently released book:
Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America
About The Book
This is the shocking true-life story of how PFAS—a set of toxic chemicals most people have never heard of—poisoned the entire country. Based on original, shoe-leather reporting in four highly contaminated towns and damning documents from the polluters’ own files, Poisoning the Well traces an ugly history of corporate greed and devastation of human lives.
The book covers that PFAS, the “forever chemicals” found in everyday products, from cooking pans to mascara, are coursing through the veins of 97 percent of Americans. It documents the pain of families who lost sisters and daughters, cousins and neighbors, after PFAS leached into their drinking water. And it shows evidence that the makers of forever chemicals may have known for decades about the deadly risks of their products—because their own scientists have been documenting these dangers since the 1960s. It highlights the failure of our government, time after time, to provide basic protections to its citizens.
About the Authors
Sharon Udasin is a reporter for The Hill, covering U.S. West climate and policy from her home base in Boulder, Colorado. She was a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder and has also reported for The Jerusalem Post and The New York Jewish Week. A graduate of both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Journalism School, Sharon also received a 2022 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award and was honored by the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership in 2013.
Rachel Frazin covers energy and environment policy for The Hill: that’s everything from climate change to gasoline prices to toxic chemicals to renewable and fossil energy. It was through this work that she learned about, and became alarmed by, “forever chemicals.” She is originally from South Florida, and she studied journalism and political science at (the very cold) Northwestern University. Previously, her work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Beast, the Tampa Bay Times, and The Palm Beach Post.
Excerpt from the book:
As executives at DuPont and 3M were discovering the lethal effects of PFAS, the consequences were becoming painfully obvious at the plant outside Decatur. Even in the glory days, when 3M seemed like an economic savior for communities along the Tennessee River, red flags were popping up along its banks. Fifteen years after it opened the Decatur plant, 3M found PFOS in a Decatur plant worker’s blood sample—a finding that repeated itself in several employees in 1979 and became even more striking in the decades that followed.
3M was finding not only a wide presence of the chemicals in Decatur workers’ blood, but also that the exposures were making people sick. One study based on data collected in the 1990s found high risk levels for prostate and colorectal cancers, while another noted that workers had an increased risk of death from bladder cancer. The first study revealed that around the time that 3M was downplaying any potential health harms of PFOS to the EPA, the company was internally identifying conditions to watch among its own personnel. 3M scientists listed liver and bladder cancers, as well as endocrine and reproductive disorders, as being of interest based on “a substantial body of literature,” including PFOA and PFOS research.
You can get a copy of the book here.
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