PFAS – Multimedia

This infographic explores how PFAS can affect your health, including the development of cancer and liver damage, and how it poses a threat to the environment, contaminating groundwater and harming wildlife.

Forever chemicals are extremely useful in industry, but they can also leak into the environment, your drinking water and your blood. And they last (practically) forever. But now chemists have a new way to destroy them: burning them with water.

Per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) are used in a broad range of consumer goods. Due to their extreme stability, they accumulate in the environment and organisms, posing a significant threat to human health. Hence, proper monitoring of PFAS is required to help mitigate these harmful effects.

This poster compilation outlines the latest LC-MS/MS and QTOF MS methods for accurate environmental monitoring.

Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are used in a variety of industrial processes and consumer products. They are highly stable, resistant to degradation and persist in our environment as potentially hazardous ‘forever chemicals’.

Pre-optimized method packages can help labs establish robust analysis workflows and support compliance with the latest regulations.

In this Teach Me in 10, we hear from field application scientist Marc Elie on the challenges of PFAS analysis in matrices including drinking water and wastewater and how to mitigate interference and contamination on LC-MS/MS instrumentation.

Lucy Lawrence and Dr.Detlef Jensen, senior expert in applied markets at Thermo Fisher Scientific, will discuss Ion chromatography and how to keep drinking water safe in detail.

This latest episode is an audio version of a cover story from our online magazine, The Scientific Observer. Writer Kerry Taylor Smith explores the spread of "forever" chemicals called PFAS. Persistent and ever-present, scientists are only starting to unravel the impact PFAS may have on the environment and our health.

While the unique chemical properties of PFAS make them useful, the same properties make them difficult to break down, causing a threat to the environment and human health.