Is anyone in EA exploring PFAS?

By Christina Barstow @ 2025-09-02T16:26 (+25)

This is a linkpost to https://insightforimpact.substack.com/p/pfas-and-personal-responsibility?r=1hfcu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=chatgpt.com&triedRedirect=true

Over the last few years, awareness around PFAS (“forever chemicals”) has been growing with water contamination lawsuits, EPA drinking water standards, and NGO campaigns calling for urgent action. At the same time, I haven't seen a lot of discussion of PFAS within effective altruism, even though it raises important questions about evidence, scale, neglectedness, and tractability.

I recently wrote a piece on my Substack Insights for Impact, where I try to bring together what we actually know about PFAS:

• Evidence on health effects: strong links to outcomes like reduced vaccine response, high cholesterol, impaired fetal growth, and kidney cancer.
• Exposure levels: PFAS are detectable in nearly everyone’s blood, with higher burdens near industrial and military sites.
• Future considerations: implementing drinking water standards, funding research on newer PFAS compounds, and reducing reliance on plastics and PFAS-treated products.

This raises some EA questions:

• How big is the health burden from PFAS compared to other global health risks?
• How neglected is funding for independent PFAS research and advocacy?
• Are there tractable interventions from water filtration to regulatory reform that might be promising from an EA perspective?

I would love to hear if others in the EA community have come across work quantifying the global burden of PFAS exposure or assessing potential interventions. It feels like a topic that sits at the edge of EA discussions on environmental health and global public goods, but one where more evidence and prioritization could be useful.