Since we’ve long flung poisons, toxins, and chemicals around like the Swedish Chef, I’ve long wondered what happens to all this human-made nastiness when it mixes together, is boiled under the sun, blended by ocean waves, and exhaled from dolphin blowholes.

Research published in September confirmed my fears. Mixtures of different types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are often more toxic than single compounds, according to the authors. They suggested human exposure to these chemicals is more dangerous than previously thought. They recommended that forever chemicals be regulated as mixtures.

PFAS are a class of some 15,000 compounds most frequently used to make products grease-, stain-, and water-resistant. Forever chemicals have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease, chronic intestinal inflammation, elevated blood pressure during pregnancy, altered thyroid function, and weight gain.

This growing list of negative health outcomes are caused at parts per trillion levels. One part per trillion equates to about a grain of sand in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Since these compounds don’t naturally break down in the environment, humans — and let’s not forget non-humans — are almost always exposed to more than one PFAS compound at a time. Regulatory agencies, however, largely look at the chemicals in isolation, meaning regulators are likely underestimating public health and environmental threats.

PFAS may be contaminating drinking water for up to 70% of some 140 million people in the United States who draw water from aquifers via private or public wells, according to research published in October.

The U.S. Geological Survey sampling and modeling of groundwater contamination found some readings up to 37,000 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s PFAS drinking water limits. In some areas virtually all of those using public systems that draw from groundwater are likely drinking contaminated water.

These ubiquitous human-created industrial chemicals are estimated to be in the blood of 98% of U.S. adults, and they have been found in the blood of babies in the womb and in children.

Unsurprisingly, new research aimed at identifying which U.S. neighborhoods face increased exposure to forever chemicals found those living near Superfund sites, brownfields, and industrial polluters generally have higher levels of the dangerous compounds in their blood. Those who live within 3 miles of a Superfund site have up to 107% higher levels of some PFAS compounds.

Humans aren’t the only ones collecting forever chemicals in their bodies.

A 2020 study by University of Rhode Island professor Rainer Lohmann, who has a Ph.D. in environmental chemistry, and nine other researchers looked for 36 new and already banned types of PFAS in juvenile seabirds from three East Coast habitats near and far from human sources of these chemicals. They found high levels of a particular type of toxic PFAS — perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) — in every bird.

In April the EPA released its final toxicity assessment for the compound. The “available evidence indicates that PFOS exposure is likely to cause hepatic, immunological, cardiovascular, and developmental effects in humans.”

While PFOS was largely phased out beginning two decades ago, average levels in several populations of polar bears and seals continue to increase, according to a paper co-authored by Lohmann and recently published in the journal Science of The Total Environment.

Of the animals examined in the study, polar bears had the highest PFAS concentrations, some 10 times more than what has been found in people in the Arctic. The researchers also found the average concentrations of another PFAS compound, perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), have steadily increased the past few decades in all populations of polar bears and seals studied. PFNA is a potential endocrine disrupting compound.

The paper, “Cross-cutting studies of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) in Arctic wildlife and humans,” is the latest in a growing collection of research that has found PFAS in some 600 animal species, including those who are threatened or endangered.

All this research, on just one species of contaminant, is likely just the tip of the melting iceberg.

Water is life, but we poison it — and ourselves — at will. I’ll let author, scientist, and Classical High School graduate Anna Farro Henderson explain.

“I want to think that we have created a less cruel society than the Romans. We don’t sacrifice gladiators for entertainment,” the Providence native wrote on page 204 of her recent book Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood. “But we do test the safety of more than eighty thousand chemicals used in industrial processes, toys, household products, and cosmetics as an ongoing experiment on the public. Only after chemicals are connected to cancer, illness, and family tragedy do we begin to discuss their safety. The human sacrifices are unintended but predetermined.”

Any substance that goes down a drain, runs off a landscape, or is buried underground, could potentially end up polluting drinking water sources, streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, and coastal waters.

These potential harms come in all shapes, sizes, and toxicities: pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides; pharmaceuticals; oil, gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and petrochemicals; fertilizers; deicing fluids; household cleaning products; microplastics; and, of course, forever chemicals.

Since ecoRI News was founded in 2009, contaminants that have been identified in southern New England drinking water supplies include: agricultural pollutants such as nitrate and atrazine; industrial pollutants such as lead, mercury, radium-226, and strontium-90; and water-treatment byproducts such as total trihalomethanes, chloroform, and cadmium. A newly identified substance will likely be next.

Chloronitramide anion is produced when water is treated with chloramine, a chemical formed by mixing chlorine and ammonia. Chloramine is often used to kill viruses and bacteria in municipal water systems.

In a research article published late last month, the authors noted the existence of the byproduct was discovered about 40 years ago, but it was only identified now because analysis techniques have improved, which finally allowed scientists to determine the chemical’s structure. They noted it could take years to figure out whether chloronitramide anion is dangerous.

The scientists said they have no hard evidence to suggest that the compound represents a danger, but that it bears similarities to other chemicals of concern.

Drinking water can reasonably be expected to contain at least trace amounts of some contaminants. But municipality budgets and staff can’t keep up with the growing tidal wave of pollutants we continue to unleash with little thought. (Bottled water, which sits in plastic that leaches chemicals, isn’t immune to this contamination, especially considering tap water is better regulated.)

A 2016 study by the Newton, Mass.-based Silent Spring Institute found that pollutants from household wastewater can make their way into private wells, and that backyard septic systems are likely to blame.

In tests of water samples from private wells on Cape Cod, Silent Spring Institute researchers found 27 unregulated contaminants, including a dozen different pharmaceuticals, a variety of chemicals used in non-stick coatings, and flame retardants.

Those findings reinforced my growing concerns about the risks posed by all these different chemicals mixing with each other in ways we don’t understand. We’re just now beginning to learn.

Some 44 million U.S. residents get their drinking water from private wells, including about 20% of New England’s population. Since private wells tend to be shallower than public wells and are less frequently monitored, they also are more susceptible to contamination.

Homes that rely on private wells also tend to have their own septic systems. About 25% of all U.S. households use a septic system for processing wastewater. Silent Spring Institute researchers have found that hormone-disrupting chemicals and pharmaceuticals from septic systems can leach into groundwater and enter wells and nearby waterways.

In Narragansett Bay, Lohmann, the URI professor of oceanography, has found triclosans, antibacterial agents found in many personal-care products and which have been identified as posing risks to humans and the environment; alkylphenols, widely used as detergents and known to disrupt the reproductive system; and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), industrial products used as flame retardants on a variety of consumer products.

“By themselves, none of these results makes me think that we shouldn’t be swimming in the bay or eating fish caught there,” he told me 2011. “But we only tested for three compounds that might be of concern, and we know there are hundreds more out there. The totality of all those compounds together is what may be worrisome.”

Lohmann has found “legacy compounds” in ocean basins from the Arctic to Antarctica. “There are thousands of chemical compounds that are used by industry for all sorts of purposes, and it turns out that they aren’t well regulated at all,” he told me two years later.

Bottlenose dolphins in Florida’s Sarasota Bay and Louisiana’s Barataria Bay are exhaling microplastic fibers, according to recently published research. In humans, inhaled microplastics can cause lung inflammation, which can lead to health problems such as pneumonia, bronchitis, scarring, and possibly cancer.

Plastics also contain chemicals that can impact cardiovascular health, neurological function, and reproduction. Since dolphins are also mammals, marine scientists are concerned microplastics may pose similar health risks.

There is an estimated 170 trillion bits of oceanic microplastic. These tiny toxin bits are also in most other waterbodies, including drinking water wells.

When microplastics and PFAS — two of the most omnipresent human-made substances on the planet — join forces there is an interaction that makes them even more harmful, according to recently published research.

The study’s authors exposed water fleas to mixtures of these toxic substances and found they suffered more severe health effects, including lower birth rates and developmental problems, such as delayed sexual maturity and stunted growth. The research also showed those fleas previously exposed to chemical pollution were less able to withstand the new exposures.

Some 400 chemicals regularly used in everyday plastic products have been linked to breast cancer, and the dangerous compounds could be a driver of increasingly elevated cancer rates in young women, according to new research.

Despite a substantial history of public health tragedies caused by unabated chemical use — lead paint, leaded gasoline, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), asbestos, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), to name just a handful — testing before a substance is approved is less than rigorous.

Persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic pollutants such as PCBs, banned nearly five decades ago, continue to wreak havoc on biodiversity. A 2018 study suggested PCBs will cause the extinction of up to 50% of orca populations over the next 100 years.

PFAS have shown to impact marine mammal reproduction and immunity in ways similar to that of PCBs.

Despite having no idea how these hundreds of thousands of chemicals, cleaners, and poisons are interacting with each other in various aquatic environments, including in drinking water sources, we relentlessly release new substances on the natural world, creating ever-changing concoctions and forcing researchers and regulators to play a never-ending game of catch-up.

In the late 1960s, some 1,000 miles of New England water pipes were sprayed with a now-known neurotoxin, in response to complaints that water smelled and tasted funny. The poison, tetrachloroethylene, which is still used in dry cleaning, metal degreasing, and textile processing, wasn’t discovered in the water supply until 1979. Research later linked exposure to increased risk for stillbirths and other pregnancy complications.

A water test performed in March 2014 at the Scituate Reservoir — the drinking water supply for 60% of Rhode Islanders — discovered trace amounts of a synthetic steroid (androstenedione) found in performance-enhancing drugs.

During the past 15 years the Connecticut Department of Public Health has received reports of contamination from pesticides and heavy metals in levels more than twice the EPA’s recommended limit of 0.01 milligrams per liter in residential drinking water across the state.

In 2009, the Stamford Department of Health and Social Services notified residents that two pesticides (dieldrin and chlordane) had been found in private wells. Stamford officials initially thought a landfill was the source, but the contamination was eventually linked to historic pesticide use.

The Rhode Island Department of Transportation annually applies thousands of gallons of herbicide to public lands across the state. And business is booming for mosquito and tick spraying. Companies that specialize in this lucrative practice have been joined by lawn-care enterprises in the dumping, often in a willy-nilly fashion, of ever more chemical pollution.

All of this mass manufactured pollution is pouring into our bodies and saturating the natural world. The consequences will no doubt be sick.

Note: Last month the Food and Drug Administration issued a request for information on PFAS in seafood to increase the agency’s understanding of the potential for forever chemical exposure from fish and shellfish and to reduce dietary exposure that may pose a health concern. The information is due by Feb. 18.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.