Preliminary results are in from blood testing provided to Southern New Hampshire residents exposed to contaminated well-water.
The contamination was discovered last March, in ground water near a plastics plant in Merrimack, called Saint-Gobain. Blood tests began in June, and now the first 147 results are in.
The contaminant is not well understood, so it makes sense to interpret the results by comparison.
On the whole, the results show those with contaminated well water near Saint-Gobain have more than twice as much of the chemical in their blood than the average American, but half as much as those tested near a similar Saint-Gobain site in Bennington, Vermont.
The Southern New Hampshire residents’ blood had less than one sixth the amount of PFOA as those people tested near a DuPont plant in the Ohio River Valley. That’s where extensive studies showed links between PFOA and various cancers, and where ongoing lawsuits have cost DuPont hundreds of millions of dollars.
Scientists say it is all but impossible to get these chemicals out of the body once they are identified.
