PFAS-contaminated drinking water harms infants

Significance

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), so-called “forever chemicals,” are pollutants of increasing concern. However, there is not yet firm evidence that the types of PFAS exposure occurring in daily life cause human health impacts. We show that New Hampshire mothers whose drinking water wells were downstream of PFAS releases had more extremely low-weight births, more extremely preterm births, and higher infant mortality than did mothers whose wells were upstream of PFAS releases. Mothers did not know the locations of their wells and so should be comparable but for their PFAS exposure. Extrapolating to the rest of the United States, PFAS impose billions of dollars of costs on U.S. residents each year by worsening infant health.

Abstract

There is evidence of widespread human exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) but limited evidence of the human health impacts of this exposure. Using data on New Hampshire births from 2010–2019, we show that mothers receiving water that had flowed beneath a PFAS-contaminated site, as opposed to comparable mothers receiving water that had flowed toward a PFAS-contaminated site, had 191% [95% CI: 83–298%] higher first-year infant mortality (611 [268–955] additional first-year deaths per 100k births); 168% [42–294%] more births before 28 wk of gestational age (466 [116–817] additional such births per 100k births); and 180% [57–302%] more births with weight below 1,000 g (607 [192–1022] additional such births per 100k births). Extrapolating to the contiguous U.S., PFAS contamination imposes annual social costs of approximately $8 billion. These health costs are substantially larger than current outside estimates of the cost of removing PFAS from the public water supply.