"The World Health Organization’s (WHO) draft drinking water guidelines for “forever chemicals” disregard best available science and require extensive revisions, two former federal officials argued in a new position paper.
The WHO draft, which focuses on the two most well-known types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), suggests guidance levels that are 25 times higher than those recently proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to the paper, published on Thursday in Environmental Science & Technology.
The co-authors, Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland and Linda Birnbaum, skewered the WHO working group for expressing uncertainty as to whether the two compounds, PFOA and PFOS, are linked to adverse health outcomes.
Such a conclusion “represents a striking and inappropriate disregard of the best available science,” wrote the authors, who respectively served as director of Science and Technology in the EPA Office of Water and director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences."
