As the United States sets its first national limits on toxic forever chemicals in drinking water, researchers say Canada is lagging when it comes to regulations.
Still, they acknowledged that Canada is making progress in trying to reduce and prevent the contamination of water in the country.
From carpeting to non-stick cookware, so-called forever chemicals, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), have been widely found in consumer products since the 1950s.
These chemicals are designed to be so strong that they don’t break down fully in the environment. They’re used to make products non-stick, oil- and water-repellent and resistant to temperature change.
Growing evidence shows PFAS are in Canadian freshwater sources and drinking water, according to Health Canada. Studies have linked PFAS to serious health problems, such as cancer, low birth weight and liver disease.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized its drinking water regulation for six PFAS last week. Under the new regulation, utilities are required to limit certain forever chemicals, including two common types —perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) — to four parts per trillion, or four nanograms per litre. As well, water providers must test for these PFAS and alert the public when levels are too high.
Similarly, Health Canada proposed new limits for PFAS in drinking water in February 2023. There are currently drinking water quality guidelines for PFOA and PFOS in Canada.
Under the current guidelines, the limit is 200 ng/L for PFOA, which is 50 times more than the U.S. limit of 4 ng/L. At 600 ng/L for PFOS, the maximum allowable amount in Canada for this type of forever chemical is 150 times more than the U.S limit.
In light of the changes south of the border, CTVNews.ca asked Health Canada whether there were any plans to change the limits, or to follow the American lead on the issue.
In a recent email to CTVNews.ca, Health Canada spokesperson Mark Johnson said the department has proposed a drinking water objective with a much lower limit of 30 ng/L for all PFAS detected in drinking water.
Canada’s strategy
Despite Canada’s proposed drinking water limit for PFAS being about eight times higher than the ones for the United States, many factors are probably at play, according to an expert.
Satinder Kaur Brar, a civil engineering professor and James and Joanne Love Chair in Environmental Engineering at York University in Toronto, has been doing work for the past few decades on various contaminants including PFAS in waters and wastewaters.
“Definitely U.S. EPA has taken a leap forward in this direction,” she said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca, noting no international standards exist. “So I would say that if we have set up higher limits here for the Canadian citizens, definitely we are exposing them more, or making them more vulnerable to these chemicals.”
Canada’s recently proposed limits only deal with drinking water, not other contaminated sources such as food, soils, sediments and air, Brar pointed out. She points to political leaders as being among those to blame for what some may perceive as holes in the proposed policy changes.
“I would say that the political will is also lacking because political will also plays an important role in bringing out these regulations,” she said. “We have left out many important environmental compartments, which are all interlinked and contributing to the overall … presence of PFAS in water.”
‘Stringent enough’?
And when it comes to laws and regulations, a senior environmental law researcher and paralegal says Canada has made strides in tackling the problem, but it’s lagging behind some countries such as the U.S.
“So while the U.S. EPA numbers are set much lower than Canada’s, what we see in Canada is at least a progression from the current guidelines, and that’s not a bad thing,” Fe de Leon, with the Canadian Environmental Law Association in Toronto, said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca.
“The question is whether it’s stringent enough to deal with the scope of impacts that these chemicals have on the environment and particularly human health.”
Health Canada’s Johnson said the final drinking water objective for PFAS will be published later this year, replacing current guidelines. Provinces and territories use these guidelines and objectives to create drinking water quality requirements for all Canadians, he said.
Provincial and territorial authorities have been monitoring treated drinking water in some regions, and the federal government has been monitoring PFAS in freshwater since 2013, Johnson added.
“Current data regarding PFAS in Canadian freshwater sources and drinking water suggest that PFAS are present at levels below the new proposed objective,” Johnson said in an emailed statement. “However, the concentrations of PFAS in freshwater and drinking water may be higher near facilities that use large amounts of these chemicals, locations where firefighting foams containing PFAS were used to put out a fire, and landfills and wastewater treatment plants.”
‘The biggest issue’
A major problem is a lack of information on the forever chemicals affecting Canadians, many of whom may be unaware of what these chemicals are, where they’re found and the impact they can have on our health and the world around us.
“The biggest issue right now is complete disclosure of how many of these chemicals are actually found in the Canadian market and are being released into the environment,” Brar said. “We don’t have a good handle on that.”
Over the last few years, she said, more sites across Canada have been “impacted substantially” by PFAS. “So this is absolutely necessary that the government moves ahead and takes action on these chemicals, and create their own strategy.”
A chemical engineering professor who leads a team that conducts research on the impacts of these chemicals says he believes that both Canada and the U.S. have made their boldest moves so far to address the problem.
“The net effect is that both the U.S. and Canada are trying to limit … these chemicals in drinking water to levels that are extremely low and barely measurable,” said Franco Berruti, director at the Institute for Chemicals and Fuels from Alternative Resources at Western University in London, Ont., in a video interview with CTVNews.ca. “At the end of the day …they will have the similar effect.”
Barriers to a solution
Berruti said there isn’t a simple solution to the problem of controlling the impact of forever chemicals. One of the barriers to regulating them is the many unknowns about PFAS.
“It’s not just a question of two or three chemicals that are considered toxic that one would regulate. But we are talking about thousands and thousands of these chemicals. We don’t even know how to analyze these chemicals,” he said.
The technologies that exist to reduce or eliminate PFAS “are very limited,” Berruti added.
Scientists are still studying different aspects of the problem, including investigating which forever chemicals are more problematic and measurable.
Out of more than 12,000 types of PFAS, Berruti estimates that only 40 may be measurable.
“To set the limits without having the ways of measuring those … extremely low concentrations doesn’t mean anything until the methodologies are there to demonstrate that those limits are reached,” he said.
While Canada doesn’t produce PFAS, Berruti said, the country should closely monitor the imports of products that are contaminated with the chemicals.
Industry concerns
Health advocates praised the U.S. move to create its first drinking water limits on PFAS, but the news wasn’t universally celebrated.
Among the concerns raised were those from water utilities, which said customers will end up paying more for water since treatment systems are expensive to install.
Actions taken in Canada have also been met with challenges and criticism.
In May 2023, Health Canada issued a draft recommendation to label PFAS, an entire class of chemicals, as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
Cassie Barker, the toxics program manager at Environmental Defence, said in March that it was important to label the entire class, not only each individual substance, as toxic, The Canadian Press reported. When Canada designated and banned some types of PFAS in 2012, Barker said, it became a “whack-a-mole” situation, because other products used to replace them also posed health risks.
In response to the proposed PFAS toxic designation, the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada wrote to Environment and Climate Change Canada in June 2023 asking that PFAS not be labelled toxic as an entire class of substances, and instead be designated on a case-by-case basis, based on proven risk.
PFAS currently used by Canadian industry “have not been shown to be of high risk” and sweeping prohibitions could cause economic hardship to the industry, it wrote in its letter.
In the States, growing awareness has led to lawsuits against manufacturers.
For example, 3M settled a series of lawsuits last June that could exceed US$12.5 billion, involving more than 300 U.S. municipalities where the chemicals were found in drinking water. The company said it plans to stop making PFAS by 2025.
In the same month, DuPont de Nemours Inc. and spinoffs Chemours Co. and Corteva Inc. reached a US$1.18-billion deal over similar complaints by about 300 drinking water providers.
And legal action has occurred in Canada as well.
According to the business law firm Osler, a class action was certified in 2021 against the National Research Council of Canada over PFAS in the surface water and groundwater at the NRC’s facility in Mississippi Mills, Ont.
With files from The Associated Press and The Canadian Press
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
