Minnesota Department of Health

News Release

July 9, 2008

Contact information

Health officials to seek participants for east metro Perfluorochemical (PFC) study
Adults in Oakdale, parts of Lake Elmo and Cottage Grove will be recruited for study to determine PFC levels in people’s bodies

Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) officials will begin recruiting participants in mid-July for the East Metro Perfluorochemical (PFC) Biomonitoring Study. PFCs are a family of manufactured chemicals that have been used for decades to make products that resist heat, oil, stains, grease and water.

Biomonitoring means directly measuring the amount of a chemical in people’s bodies. The East Metro PFC Biomonitoring Study will measure PFC levels in 200 adults who live in the east metro area, where the drinking water has been found to contain PFCs. The study stems from 2007 state legislation directing MDH to develop and implement a statewide Environmental Health Tracking and Biomonitoring (EHTB) program.

The study will help to determine whether adults in the study area have elevated levels of PFCs in their bodies compared to the general population (based on data that are collected nationally).

To be eligible for the study, adults must live in one of the two communities that are part of the study. One community comprises households that are served by the Oakdale municipal water supply. The second community includes households in Lake Elmo and Cottage Grove with private wells contaminated with perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and/or perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). The project will measure the levels of PFCs in blood samples collected from 100 adults, age 20 or older, from each community. In addition, to be in the study people must have been living at their current home before January 1, 2005.

The study is limited to adults because participation involves having blood drawn from a vein. Federal guidelines state that it is unethical to include children in this kind of research unless there is a clear benefit to them. Because there is no direct benefit to children being tested for PFCs (for example, there is no individual treatment for PFCs), the East Metro PFC Biomonitoring Study will include only adults at this time.

Participants will be identified through a recruitment process that will begin in July. In Oakdale, MDH will send letters to 500 randomly selected households served by the Oakdale city water supply. In Cottage Grove and Lake Elmo, letters will be sent to all eligible households based on MDH records of private wells that were sampled in the area. The letter will describe the project and ask each household to fill out a form about the adults living in the home. From the forms that are returned, 100 people from each of the two communities (Oakdale and Lake Elmo/Cottage Grove) will be selected at random and asked to be part of the study.

Participants in the study will be asked to provide a blood sample. This can be done at the Woodwinds clinics in Oakdale and Woodbury. Participants will also be asked to complete a brief phone survey about basic demographic information and exposure to PFCs.

The confidential results from the laboratory test for PFCs will be provided to participants who indicate that they wish to receive the results. MDH will also provide information to help them interpret their results, such as a description of how the results compare to the national average.

The results from the East Metro PFC Biomonitoring Study, taken as a whole, will help health officials make recommendations about further public health actions, including the possibility of developing an ongoing program at MDH for measuring environmental chemicals in people’s bodies.

The East Metro PFC Biomonitoring Study will only provide information on blood levels of PFCs in the people who participate, and will not be able to answer questions about health effects associated with exposure to PFCs. “One challenge associated with biomonitoring studies in general is that scientists are able to measure chemicals in the body in very small amounts, but for most chemicals we do not know yet what the levels found in people’s bodies mean for their health,” said Jean Johnson, Environmental Health Tracking & Biomonitoring Program Director at MDH.

There is currently very little information available on the health effects of PFCs in the general population, although a study of 70,000 people exposed to PFOA in drinking water in Ohio and West Virginia is underway. Studies by 3M of workers exposed to PFCs during manufacturing show no apparent impact on their health. Studies on animals have shown some health effects, such as effects on the liver, thyroid, and pancreas. But it is unclear whether these problems are likely to occur in humans and at what levels of exposure. “Research into the effects that PFCs may have on people’s health is relatively new. It will take many years – and many studies – before scientists understand any links between PFCs and human health,” Johnson said.

The 3M Company produced PFCs at its Cottage Grove facility from the late 1940s until 2002. Common products that contain the chemicals include nonstick cookware, stain-resistant carpets and fabrics, fire-fighting foam, and other industrial applications.

PFC-containing wastes, which were disposed in a number of landfills in the east metro area, have seeped into the groundwater and contaminated numerous private wells as well as some municipal wells. The PFCs that have been detected in the water include PFOS, PFOA and perfluorobutanoic acid or PFBA. The MN Pollution Control Agency is overseeing the development of plans to address the groundwater contamination at these disposal sites.

For more information on environmental health tracking and biomonitoring, go to www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/tracking. For more information on PFCs, go to www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/hazardous/topics/pfcs/index.html.

-MDH-

For more information, contact:

Doug Schultz
MDH Communications
651-201-4993

Jean Johnson
Environmental Health Tracking and Biomonitoring Program Director
651-201-5902

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