Read the full article by Pippa Neill (The Guardian).
“Last week, on the morning the government published its Pfas action plan, I got a worried phone call from a woman called Sam who lives next door to a chemical factory in Lancashire. Sam had just been hand-delivered a letter from her local council informing her that after testing, it had been confirmed that her ducks’ eggs, reared in her garden in Thornton-Cleveleys, near Blackpool, are contaminated with Pfas.
Pfas – per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as ‘forever chemicals’ due to their persistence in the environment – are a family of thousands of chemicals, and I have been reporting on them for years. Some, including those found in the eggs Sam and her family have been eating, have been linked to a wide range of serious illnesses, including certain cancers.
The levels recorded in one of the eggs was so high that if Sam ate just one a week, it would exceed the European safe weekly level for Pfas exposure 10 times over. This threshold sets out the maximum level of Pfas that can be consumed weekly over a lifetime without risking adverse health effects. Sam and her children have been eating these eggs every single day for decades.
This is what living on the frontline of regulatory failure looks like.”…