FAYETTEVILLE — Lots of data, lots of reports, and lots of unanswered questions, but plenty of knowledgeable people were able to share expertise about multiple concerns regarding PFAS and GenX contamination at a forum on the campus of Fayetteville State University on Wednesday night.
The questions on the tip of everyone’s tongue seem to run similar courses: What are the effects? How can I mitigate them?
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS, are a group of man-made chemicals that includes PFOA, PFOS and GenX.
Their full effects on the body have not been determined. Some studies of people show certain PFAS may affect growth, learning and behavior in children, lower fertility, interfere with hormones, increase cholesterol levels, affect the immune system and increase the risk of cancer.
Collections of data were interpreted. They ranged from plants grown to how deep would a well need to go to be “safe” from PFAS, to daily life and concerns about livestock.
Kate Holden, a graduate student, shared information about crops being grown with contaminants. The research is from Owen Duckworth’s lab at N.C. State University. They grew plants in soils with various levels of compost added.
“Organic carbon, compost, has been shown to consistently decrease the amount of these chemicals available to plants,” she said. “We wanted to focus on reducing the uptake of PFAS in plants.”
She said the previous research had shown that organic carbon was able to bind to the PFAS tightly, making it less available to the plants. The ultimate recommendation was that it was healthy enough and that the benefits of eating home-grown produce, in this case, would outweigh potential risks from PFAS exposure.
“The concentrations are rather small,” she said of the produce that was sampled from local crops around the plant.
The residents that submitted their crops will receive copies of those reports and data.
David Genereux from N.C. State spoke about ongoing work at the university.
“We are starting to figure things out,” he said.
His team collects groundwater and stream water samples.
“We analyze the PFAS concentrations in those samples,” he said.
One of the questions he is trying to get answered is how long it is going to take to get PFAS flushed out of the ground.
“That PFAS contamination is actually quite widespread,” he said.
He collected samples from the summer of 2018 through the first half of 2019.
All five of the tributary watersheds that were looked at in area, west and east of the Cape Fear River, were “all actually quite contaminated.”
How long will it take to flush it out of the ground? Genereux said not a lot of ground water is “hanging around for longer than 50 years.” He said that levels were dropping but that there is more “work needed on the chemical aspect of this flushing” and that they are still looking into this.
“Tentatively I think there is some good news now,” he said. “We are planning more work to look and sort out in more detail and establish permanent monitoring stations, to monitor at a large scale over time for many years to come.”
Jacquelyn MacDonald Gibson from Indiana University detailed the risks to private wells. Her research has focused on figuring out why some wells are contaminated and other wells are not.
“We look at the features of the wells, and other sources that are contributing to the risk,” she said.
This would allow her team to develop a way to predict where they need to test first and prioritize, using a data driven approach. Not all of the contamination can be linked to the same sources in every case; for example, contamination can be in waste sites like landfills or septic systems.
They take the data that they have collected, from 1,054 wells, and plug it in with 422 variables in an artificial intelligence diagnostic tool that allows them to drill down into the data and see the connections. She said that it was similar to medical diagnostics.
Virginia Guidry, with N.C. Health and Human Services, spoke to the health effects that have been found.
“Health effects have been found,” she said. “But GenX has not been studied enough.”
The North Carolina Per and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances Testing (PFAST) Network is a statewide research collaboration to test for current levels of PFAS chemicals in drinking water and air samples across the state and was created by the N.C. General Assembly.
More information about what was presented at the forum at Fayetteville State can be found by going to the ncpfastnetwork.com website. The next forum by the NCPFAST Network will be March 26 in Hope Mills. More details are available on its website about that forum as well as other events coming up.
A panel of presenters and department groups came out to share knowledge about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS.
Attendance was modest in the Shaw Auditorium at Fayetteville State University on Wednesday night. The NC PFAST Network statewide research collaboration shared some of its research findings at the forum.