Next up, we have speaker Rob Bilott. Rob Bilott is a Less Cancer board member. Has been a Less Cancer board member for several years and part of the National Cancer Prevention Workshop. We are thrilled to have Rob be part of this event. Of course, several of you know him from movie Dark Waters or from his book Exposure. He has an incredible story and we are excited to have him today. Interviewing him is Mindi Messmer who has also been part of the National Cancer Prevention Workshop. She comes to us from New Hampshire where she was a former state representative and as a scientist. Welcome Rob and Mindi. Hi. I'm Mindi Messmer. I'm an Environmental and Public Health Scientist. I want to welcome you to this Less Cancer Workshop. I'm joined here today by Attorney Rob Bilott, who has been dubbed DuPont's worse nightmare by the New York Times because of his very courageous and amazing work on exposing environmental exposures and health outcomes associated with PFAS chemicals which are these Teflon like components that have been on the market for decades. I want to welcome Rob. Rob has been an amazing force behind exposing the health effects that the companies have known about for decades on environmental exposures, and cancers, and other health effects. He was responsible for the lawsuit which formed the biggest epidemiological study in the history. Where 69,000 people exposed to PFAS in their environment unknowingly from a DuPont facility were exposed and it tied those exposures to cancers and four other health effects. All of his work was amazing and we all owe him a data gratitude the world, as I often say, because of his amazing work on these issues. They are the subject of two films, a documentary called The Devil We Know, and a major motion picture called Dark Waters, where Mark Ruffalo played Rob Bilott. I want to welcome Rob here. I know personally his work has inspired me to continue to fight here in New Hampshire and fascination to expose this very real health threat here. Rob, would you like to say a few words to start out about your work and what drove you to do this work in the first place? Great personal sacrifice that you did this work, and we're still thankful for other work he did. Well, thanks so much Mindi. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and everybody that's listening in today, to talk about what I still believe is a massive worldwide public health threat that is going, unfortunately still a little bit too much under the radar that a lot of folks still aren't even know where exist. I first got involved in this about 20 years ago when a farmer in West Virginia came to me complaining about cows dying. As a lawyer, that was doing a lot of work helping out chemical companies at the time wasn't really the kind of thing I dealt with, but taking on his case and digging into the documents that we are able to uncover led to what became a 20-year odyssey. Really, going through massive amounts of internal company studies that revealed that there was this incredible class of man-made chemicals out there called PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. We were focused on just one of them called PFOA that DuPont was using to make Teflon. The amount of information that was known to the companies that we're making and using these chemicals going back to the 1950s was staggering. The extent to which the threat to humans in the public from being exposed to these chemicals, not just from the Teflon facility that we were looking at data in West Virginia but to learn that these chemicals were being spewed out into the environment for some 60/70 years and in all kinds of different consumer products. Not just non-stick cookware, but stain-resistant waterproof clothing and carpeting, fast food wrappers, packaging, firefighting foams. As we slowly started to uncover what had been pretty well covered up for many decades by these companies and kept away from the public, kept away from the scientists, from the regulators. We began to realize the extent of the threat wasn't just in one farmer in West Virginia, the stuff was in drinking water in the entire ceramic community and frankly in drinking water all over the United States, all over the world. We began to realize it wasn't just water, the stuff was out in our air, in our soil, in vegetation, and in the blood of living things all over the planet, including about 99 percent of the people on the Earth. By the time we uncovered all this in the early 2000s, the entire planet had been contaminated and that had been covered up. What really kept me going was thinking back to the. Mr. Tennet, the farmer who came to me in 1998, saying, "If people can just see the facts, and just see what's happening here, and take some time to look at this, they'd get it." There's a major problem and it needs to be stopped. That's what I've been working on for the last 20 years, just to try to get those facts out to the public, to the scientific community, to regulators, so that we can finally understand the scope of what we're dealing with, and do something to stop it and fix it. It's been incredible to have films like The Devil We Know, and Dark Waters out there to help the public understand that this is something that impacts all of us. These are chemicals that have been linked with cancer, with PFOA in particular, kidney cancer, and testicular cancer, something we all definitely need to be aware of, and something I'm glad to be able to talk to everybody about today. Thank you so much. The Devil We Know in particular was a tool that was used by so many across United States, including myself. I came to this, like you, having been an environmental consultant for industry for 30 years, identified a pediatric cancer cluster in the Seacoast of New Hampshire. The worlds came together when I realized PFAS was a big contaminant in our water systems here on the Seacoast of New Hampshire, then came to find out that there's still an industry that use these chemicals every single day out of their air sacs in southern New Hampshire, and continued to fight to expose these issues. I took Devil We Know across our state, and many others did across the nation, to use it as a tool to inform the public about the dangers of these chemicals, and also to build advocacy and support for legislative work I was doing. I was in the legislature here in New Hampshire for a couple of years, and we are now responsible for some of the strictest drinking water protections in the country relating to these chemicals, for four of them only out of the 5,000 we know plus that exist right now. New Jersey was actually the beginning of this and now New Hampshire has some of the strictest, and now other states are following suit. But as you say, it is an amazing thing that you accomplish, because in general, we're often not able to tie environmental exposure to outcomes like cancers, it's very difficult to do. You need tens of thousands of people in order to have the power in those studies to provide a linkage. That work that you did is so very important, because that science is being used as the basis for coming up with these regulatory standards across the States. What do you think needs to be done moving forward in terms of policy-making to prevent this from ever happening again here in the United States? Well, I think step one would be education and outreach to folks, to understand how our systems actually work. I think most people assume, when they turn on the faucet, that somebody is there and making sure that there's nothing that could possibly cause cancer, or other kinds of harms, and if it was, it was being addressed and regulated. What we see with the example of PFOA and PFAS is that's not necessarily the case, that all of the entire system hinges on the assumption that information is actually being provided to the regulators and to the scientific community. Here it wasn't, it was being covered up and withheld. We're now having to play catch up. One of the things I've tried to really help people understand as well, and this is what I address in my book, Exposure, is the overlap with our legal system, and the difficulties when science meets the law. In this case, when you're dealing with environmental contaminants that may be linked with cancer, for example, it's incredibly difficult for those who've been exposed to actually deal with that in the legal system because in the United States the people who are exposed are told they have the burden to prove that that chemical is actually causing harm, can cause cancer, and that they have to do whatever studies are necessary and come forward with that evidence. As you see in the films that deal with PFOA, how difficult that is. Typically, especially with cancers, as you pointed out, it often takes massive studies with tens of thousands of people to have a big enough study with enough power to actually confirm the increased cancer rates. How often do communities, or exposed people have access to the funds to do massive studies like that? This is one of the few times in history with PFOA that we could do it, and that we were able to do it, because we used the money from the company that had caused the problem, used their money to get these studies done. I think we've got to be able to find ways to get studies actually completed and done, that are big enough with enough power to confirm what these chemicals are doing to us. Most importantly, those companies that are doing this need to be funding those. We shouldn't be having them running the studies. They should be the ones paying for it, not the people who are exposed, not the States, not the water providers. If they're going to sit back and say, you have to prove this is causing you harm, the funds should be available to do that. I think that's something that really, I think has been highlighted by the story with PFOA, is just the incredible difficulty under our current systems for doing that. Hopefully we can think of a better way now. All of the things that you mentioned are actually happening right now in the state of New Hampshire with respect to this industrial emission that continues every single day. EPA came in, and they sampled what was coming out of the air stacks of this plant. They found a 190 PESOs chemicals and only about a 100 of those chemicals coming out have ever seen before. The industry is far ahead of us in terms of coming up with new chemicals of the same class that they use in their processes but the rest of us are trying to catch up. Not only just with the health effects, but exactly how to analyze for these sample, for these chemicals, and what it all means. How can we turn that around? I know that in Europe, for instance, they take much of a more precautionary approach. Can we regulate these chemicals as a class like we've done so in the past with PCBs, where we assume that we know what's going on with one of these chemicals, it's bad for us to inhale or to ingest. Can we approach this in a different way, turn it around so that we give the people the benefit of the doubt rather than the chemicals moving forward and how would we go about doing that? That's an excellent point and that's something that is really being discussed and debated heavily all over the world right now. In this case with PFOA and the broader class of PFAS chemicals is really been used as an example of why we need to be having that discussion. Here it took 20 years to get the information out to the public, to the scientists, to the regulators about what was already known about the health threats from one of these chemicals, PFOA. As you indicated, we now know there are hundreds, if not thousands of related chemicals in this same class of completely man-made perpolyfluoroalkylated substances or forever chemicals. These chemicals that share these common characteristics of carbon-fluorine bond completely man-made, never existed on the planet prior to being invented after World War II. This incredible ability to persist out in the environment stay there virtually forever. We recall these forever chemicals now. But as you see with the story with PFOA, look how long it took to get that information out about one of them and then when the information finally starts to roll out and we finally have enough studies and everything, it's finally starting to satisfy these demands for bigger and bigger studies, we finally start to see steps being taken to try to address, begin regulating, and even begin phasing out that one. As soon as we see that happen, the chemicals tweaked slightly. A couple of carbons are knocked off. Instead of the C8 PFOA that DuPont was using and then starting to make down in North Carolina, they switched, they knocked a couple of carbons off, made a C6 they call Gen X and started making that in North Carolina and then it ends up in the drinking water. Then when it's found in the drinking water, it's almost as if we went right back at 20 years in time. The community is told, well you can't show that there are any health effects and all that stuff about PFOA that's a different chemical. You have nothing about this new one to show any problem. It's almost like a whack-a-mole game. You finally get information about one of them, you finally start to beat that one down and then it pops up as something new. You're seeing a lot of discussion now in the States at the federal level for the first time and really internationally in particular about trying to address this in a more comprehensive class-wide way. We can take chemicals like dioxins, like PCBs, group them according to certain characteristics. That's something that's being debated but this issue is being used as a prime example of why what we're doing currently one at a time doesn't work. Because think about it, what's going on in the meantime? Well, that 20 years is passing as we're waiting for these studies and we're waiting for regulations, people are being exposed. Gen-X it's in the drinking water in Wilmington North Carolina right now. It's being pumped into the Ohio River, being found in drinking water supplies in Kentucky. Right now, people are being exposed, they have the risk of developing cancers and we're being told let's wait and let's start this whole process. It doesn't work and folks are trying to find a better way to do it. That's great news. What kind of changes do we need to make? I think what needs to happen is there needs to be less industry influence in regulatory communities and the regulatory agencies. I'm hopeful that with some of the changes that we're going to see in the next few years, the EPA will become more proactive on these chemicals, but we also need changes. We need to make sure that the industry has to present this information to get their chemicals approved, they're camping in these backdoor rolling approvals that they get. How can we make those kinds of changes to make sure that we can effectively regulate these chemicals and understand that most people understand what the effects are from these in order to generate some more advocacy and some more support from the public. I mean, one of the things I talked about was that film was so helpful in really exposing [inaudible] exposing what has happened. That really generated a lot of activity and support behind our regulatory attempts here in the state of New Hampshire but the onus is on us all the time to generate that advocacy, to educate people. I think that's really what the regulatory agencies are supposed to be doing for us. You mentioned that often people just think that people are taking care of it and this is really not a political issue. It should not be a political issues, it should be a bipartisan issue, it's health effects. Anyone can get cancer, anyone can get ulcerative colitis from exposure to PFAS. What kinds of changes need to be made on a national level that can help make sure that this doesn't happen again with other chemicals? It's a great question. Here you've got these chemicals that have been pumped out for 70 years and we're just now starting to learn about them. We're approaching them as we just discussed one at a time and you've got this incredibly slow moving regulatory process that you just mentioned. Historically you look back and there's incredible revolving doors between the industry folks and the people at the states, in particular states or at the federal level and that's incredibly difficult dynamic to address. The more people understand how this system works and what is actually going on and again, that's why I tried to really go into these different levels in my book. Not only do we have to understand the science, we have to understand how that science becomes regulatory standards, how that process works, how it works through the legal system. All of these things are happening at the same time. We can't be dealing with problems like PFAS in our own little silos. Scientists working on their issues over here, the lawyers doing these things over here, the regulators, they have to understand how all of these things work together. This problem of lack of understanding how these systems work, I think is critical to helping people understand what we can do to fix it. Yeah. We have to know how it works in order to know how do we step in and stop this and fix it. I think we're seeing for the first time really discussions occurring here in the US about trying to figure out ways to do this differently. This is the way we've been doing it for an awful long time. As you say, it's not necessarily but it shouldn't be a partisan issue. These are problems that have continued through multiple administrations, through both parties. They've gone on for decades and unless we address it in a really systemic way it'll likely continue. Again, it's the public health that's at risk here so we all share the urgency in getting it done and doing it right. I don't think people have realized that's a really good point. How much really goes on behind the scenes? As a first year registrator, when I put the first PFAS regulation bill in, the lobbyists did not recognize me. I could sit in the hallways next to the lobbyists and listen to their conversations about me and my bill before they realized who I was. Even in a small state like New Hampshire they came in in a big way, trying to stamp down any of our approaches to try to regulate these chemicals and luckily, even with the chemical companies 3M trying to block our implementation of enforcement standards here in New Hampshire, we were able to succeed. It is a big issue across a nation. These companies have a lot of money to spend to stop what we're trying to do to protect public health and I just want to thank you so much Rob for all the amazing work you have done. I say to everyone that the entire world owes you a debt of gratitude for the personal sacrifices and professional sacrifices you have made to uncover this very important issue and just amazing work. I want to thank you on behalf of everyone who's watching and everyone listens to everything you do and say that we are so thankful for your work. Well, thank you so much. I really want to thank Mr. Tennant. Mr. Tennant and his family, the Joe Kiger, the folks in Parkersburg and the surrounding communities that all came together, 70,000 of them. They gave blood, they gave private medical information to researchers to make sure that the rest of us now know about this problem. We really owe that entire community a debt of gratitude that we're able to now be talking about this and the entire world now realizes the scope of this problem. Remember, these are completely man-made chemicals only made by a couple of companies. It's pretty easy to say who ought to be responsible for the costs and the damages and the problems, who ought to be paying for that going forward. It's just remarkable that we really haven't been doing that and that it's been put upon the taxpayers and they expose communities and it continues to this day. Hopefully I think we all have an opportunity to understand the scope of what we're dealing with, who ought to be responsible and how we can fix it. Thank you and I hope that folks listening in are able to continue this discussion and help raise awareness of particularly these environmental causes of cancer and other diseases that we have the ability to stop those exposures and make sure future generations don't continue the same pattern we've been doing. Thanks so much Rob have a great day. Thank you. Thanks Mindy.
