Forever chemicals are hiding everywhere. These five habits can help you avoid them. (From the archives)

**Shumita Basu** (0:00)
Hello, there. It's Shumita. I'm so excited to be back from parental leave. I've been working on some brand new episodes with the team. Those are going to come out starting next week. So in the meantime, here is one episode from our archives. It aired in May of 2025 I hope you enjoy it.
This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, How Forever Chemicals Have Poisoned the World.
For most of his life, Michael Hickey never saw himself as an activist.

**Mariah Blake** (0:43)
He's an insurance underwriter. He has a fear of public speaking.

**Shumita Basu** (0:48)
That's investigative journalist Mariah Blake.

**Mariah Blake** (0:50)
He had no interest in environmental issues. He had no interest in politics. He liked to joke that he got his news from ESPN.

**Shumita Basu** (0:57)
Then in 2010, his father was diagnosed with an aggressive kidney cancer and died a few years later at the age of 70 Michael was devastated, and he started to think about how this could have happened and about some of the other deaths in their small town of Housick Falls, New York.

**Mariah Blake** (1:13)
Everyone in the community had stories of people who had died young of cancer, and there seemed to be extraordinarily high rates of rare cancers and aggressive cancers.

**Shumita Basu** (1:26)
Michael began to suspect that these deaths had something to do with the local Teflon factory where his father had worked for many years.

**Mariah Blake** (1:33)
So I typed Teflon and cancer into Google, and he called up this large health study that had taken place in West Virginia, and it showed that this particular chemical called PFOA, which is a type of forever chemical, had been linked to kidney cancer.

**Shumita Basu** (1:50)
He worried that the town's drinking water might be contaminated with this chemical, and he tried to get local authorities to test the water, but he wasn't getting anywhere.

**Mariah Blake** (1:59)
Michael eventually ordered a testing kit, and he tested the water himself, and it turned out that, yes, the drinking water had very high levels of this chemical PFOA in it.

**Shumita Basu** (2:11)
PFOA is a type of PFAS, which is the name for a broad group of synthetic chemicals often called Forever Chemicals because of how long they take to break down. From Michael and his community, many were being exposed to high levels of PFAS, but they're also, to a lesser degree, in so many household goods, things that we all use every day, from food wrappers to cleaning products to shampoo.
In her new book, They Poisoned the World, Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals, Mariah takes a deep and expansive look at this class of compounds. And listen, I know what you might be thinking, this feels huge, inescapable even. But stick around and Mariah will tell you why she has a lot of hope for the future, thanks to activism from people like Michael. And she offers some practical tips on what you can do right now to protect yourself and your family from exposure. I started by asking Mariah to explain what exactly Forever Chemicals are.

**Mariah Blake** (3:09)
Forever Chemicals are PFAS. They are a large family of chemicals with some really amazing properties. So, they're incredibly resistant to heat, to stains, to water, to grease, to electrical currents. They stand up to caustic chemicals that destroy virtually all other materials, and that makes them extremely useful. So, these chemicals have really ushered in space travel, high-speed computing. They have really opened the outdoors to ordinary Americans, as a result of waterproof clothing, like GORE-TEX. And they've transformed thousands of everyday items, from clothing to furniture to dental floss.
Anything you have in your home that is nonstick or waterproof or grease-resistant, you know, a lot of packaging in restaurants, all of those things contain these chemicals.
On the other hand, they are probably the most insidiant pollutant in all of human history. So we're talking about a class of chemicals that are highly toxic, even in miniscule doses. They stay in the environment for hundreds or even thousands of years. I've actually seen an internal industry document that estimated the half-life for one of these chemicals was a million years.

**Shumita Basu** (4:25)
Oh, my God, that's shocking.

**Mariah Blake** (4:26)
So we're talking a timeline that's more akin to nuclear waste than to ordinary chemicals. And they are literally polluting the entire planet. So they are in the blood of basically every living being. They are polluting ecosystems in the remotest parts of the world.
No place on Earth is free of these chemicals. Wow.

**Shumita Basu** (4:52)
I was about to ask, I mean, where does it end up in our bodies?