‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Everywhere. What Are They Doing to Us?

By Kim Tingley | The New York Times Magazine | August 18, 2023

Read the full article by Kim Tingley (The New York Times Magazine)

"The Faroe Islands, an incongruous speckling of green in the North Atlantic, are about as far away as you can hope to get on Earth from a toxic-waste dump, time zones distant from the nearest population centers (Norway to the east, Iceland to the west). Pál Weihe was born in the Faroes and has lived there for most of his life. He is a public-health authority for the nation, population around 53,000; chairman of the Faroese Medical Association and chief physician of the Department of Occupational Medicine and Public Health in the Faroese hospital system. He is also vice chairman of the Faroe Islands Art Society; a widower; a grandfather. A crumpled funeral program and half-empty juice boxes share space in the back seat of his Land Cruiser.

Despite the remoteness of his location, Weihe’s medical career has been defined by his efforts to protect the Faroese from exposure to chemicals that reach the islands from across the sea. His research clinic is a cozy two-story house on a hill just above the Tórshavn harbor. Medical textbooks in English and Danish (the Faroes are part of the Kingdom of Denmark) line the walls, hinting at the scope of this task: “Basic and Clinical Immunology”; “Klinisk Social Medicin”; “Marine Medicine Research Collection”; “Gynaekologi”; “Hunter’s Diseases of Occupations.” His colleagues are almost all women, and at 73, he is decades their elder. The slender mahogany chairs he has chosen for the conference room, made by a local carpenter, bow to the future: “They have a feminine shape,” he said, “and this is a house of women.”

On a blustery morning in early April, the house was relatively quiet because of the Easter holiday, but two staff members, Jóhanna Petursdóttir and Marita Hansen, had come in with Weihe to examine volunteers enrolled in an ongoing study that began in 1986. Back then, Weihe and a Danish professor of environmental medicine, Philippe Grandjean, recruited more than 1,000 pregnant women, and later their newborns, to study the impact of mercury from seafood on fetal and child development. The Faroese mother-infant pairs showed that exposure to the toxin in the womb, even at low levels, can cause learning and memory deficits in children, findings that led to global advisories for pregnant women to limit their fish intake. Grandjean and Weihe continued enrolling new groups whenever there was funding to do so and moved on to assessing the impacts of other pollutants."

This content provided by the PFAS Project.