After PFAS Contamination on English Channel Island, Government Panel Recommends Bloodletting for Those Affected (theguardian.com) 70
Jersey is an island in the English channel, "a self-governing British Crown Dependency near the coast of northwest France," according to Wikipedia — population: 103,267.
But now some residents of Jersey "have been recommended bloodletting to reduce high concentrations of 'forever chemicals' in their blood," reports the Guardian, "after tests showed some islanders have levels that can lead to health problems." Private drinking water supplies in Jersey were polluted by the use of firefighting foams containing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) at the island's airport, which were manufactured by the U.S. multinational 3M. .. Bloodletting draws blood from a vein in measured amounts. It is safe and the body replenishes the blood naturally, but it must be repeated until clean...
In response to the blood results, the government established an independent PFAS scientific advisory panel to advise public policy. The panel's first report recommended that the government should look at offering bloodletting to affected residents. "Studies show that bloodletting is an effective way to lower levels of PFAS in blood," said Ian Cousins, one of the panel members, though he added that there were no guarantees the process would prevent or cure diseases associated with the chemicals. The therapy costs about £100,000 upfront and then as much as £200,000 a year to treat 50 people. The panel is also considering the benefit of the drug cholestyramine, which a study has shown reduces PFAS in blood more quickly and cheaply, albeit with possible side effects. The government says it plans to launch a clinical service by early 2025.
Contamination persisted on the island for decades. "We know they started to use 3M's firefighting foam in the 1960s and then ramped up in the 1990s in weekly fire training exercises, after which foam started to appear in nearby streams," said Jeremy Snowdon, a former Jersey airport engineer who drank contaminated water for years. He has measured elevated levels of PFAS in his own blood and has high cholesterol.
The article includes this quote from one of the 88 residents of the polluted area found to have high levels of PFAS after blood testing. "I just want this out of my body. I don't want to end up with bladder cancer."
But now some residents of Jersey "have been recommended bloodletting to reduce high concentrations of 'forever chemicals' in their blood," reports the Guardian, "after tests showed some islanders have levels that can lead to health problems." Private drinking water supplies in Jersey were polluted by the use of firefighting foams containing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) at the island's airport, which were manufactured by the U.S. multinational 3M. .. Bloodletting draws blood from a vein in measured amounts. It is safe and the body replenishes the blood naturally, but it must be repeated until clean...
In response to the blood results, the government established an independent PFAS scientific advisory panel to advise public policy. The panel's first report recommended that the government should look at offering bloodletting to affected residents. "Studies show that bloodletting is an effective way to lower levels of PFAS in blood," said Ian Cousins, one of the panel members, though he added that there were no guarantees the process would prevent or cure diseases associated with the chemicals. The therapy costs about £100,000 upfront and then as much as £200,000 a year to treat 50 people. The panel is also considering the benefit of the drug cholestyramine, which a study has shown reduces PFAS in blood more quickly and cheaply, albeit with possible side effects. The government says it plans to launch a clinical service by early 2025.
Contamination persisted on the island for decades. "We know they started to use 3M's firefighting foam in the 1960s and then ramped up in the 1990s in weekly fire training exercises, after which foam started to appear in nearby streams," said Jeremy Snowdon, a former Jersey airport engineer who drank contaminated water for years. He has measured elevated levels of PFAS in his own blood and has high cholesterol.
The article includes this quote from one of the 88 residents of the polluted area found to have high levels of PFAS after blood testing. "I just want this out of my body. I don't want to end up with bladder cancer."
Just great ... (Score:2, Flamebait)
some residents of Jersey "have been recommended bloodletting to reduce high concentrations of 'forever chemicals' in their blood,"
Releasing more PFAS (back) into the environment. :-)
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Solution to pollution is dilution (tm)
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>"Solution to pollution is dilution (tm)"
OK, *that* is funny. I needed a laugh this morning :)
But you missed the leading "The", which makes it flow better...
The solution to pollution is dilution
https://www.goodreads.com/quot... [goodreads.com]
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Nevermind, we don't have these in modern Pleiadian. And when I remember to put them in, I can't edit the text.
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You don't need to go to the Pleiades (what's that - 400-odd light years? "444" according to Wiki) to find languages which don't use articles.
I'm trying to remember enough Polish to say if absence-of-articles is a general thing for members of the Slavonic family, or if some Slav
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The ones in the Balkans have them, but append them at the end of the noun.
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Then again, I had a recent tussle on my Spanish course about where/ when you precede a verb with le- la- or lo-, versus when these pronouns follow the verb. It's probably not the only case when you tack frilly bits of language onto the ends of otherwise normal words.
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That's a good question, actually, because all these started from a common base, the old church slavonic as used by the ancient Bulgarian church that spread among all slavs with Christianity between the 9th and 11th century or so.
Then at some point the languages in the South-Eastern part of Europe diverged, dropped the noun cases and started using prepositions, the number of tenses expanded and lo and behold, articles appeared, but they were bolted at the end of the words. But they kept the grammatical gende
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It doesn't require bloodletting. As far as this case is concerned I have now had time to think it over and I can strongly recommend a course of leeches.
Signed: Dr. Hoffmann of Stuttgart.
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Please draft and sign an ethical analysis document on the effects of the sucked blood on the well-being of the leeches.
Signed: Dr. W. Merkwurdigliebe of Silo #1, formerly Peenemünde
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[patient bloodletting reeases] more PFAS (back) into the environment. :-)
Contaminated blood could be incinerated. Breaking down PFAS by chemistry is almost impossible, but you can still break them down by UV radiation or heat.
Trepanning back on the menu? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe leeches? Or both!
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Cutting holes in the skull won't help.
This is definitely a job for leeches. History is repeating again.
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I assume that they'd be at least an adequate option; though, amazingly talented phlebotomists for the price, supply their own anticoagulants at no additional charge, no sharps waste; and they require very little training.
Re:Trepanning back on the menu? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know you're mostly just trying to be funny, but bloodletting with or without leeches is in fact a valid therapy for several issues. It's clearly not useful fo of tr every medical condition and the ancient theory of humor imbalances that backed blood-letting throughout the ages was utter bunk. However, for hemochromatosis, bloodletting is a valid therapy. Also, for re-attached body parts, leeches can be useful for dealing with blood welling up under the skin before new blood vessel growth completes.
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Or maybe leeches? Or both!
Please don't give the (probable) incoming Secretary of HHS [wikipedia.org] any ideas.
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This is Jersey, not New Jersey.
Speaking of which, it was occupied by the Germans in WWII so we can blame them.
Maybe its a case for Bergerac
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Quite why they were importing AFFF from America, I don't know. I would have thought there were enough airports, fire brigades, fire extinguisher fillers etc in Europe to support a local AFFF manufacturing capability. "Foam" extinguishers have long been the recommended option for general purpose firefighting, including your domestic fire extinguishers.
(On which point, when did you last check the expiry date on your home's fire ex
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This is Jersey, not New Jersey.
Yeah, if it was New Jersey, it wouldn't be news that it was saturated with PFAs and other pollutants.
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Re: Trepanning back on the menu? (Score:2)
Wouldn't this just result in the creation of. . . forever leeches?!
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Yes. Maybe. I dunno, let's find out.
Medical costs are out of control! (Score:4, Interesting)
Thousands of pounds for bloodletting? A medieval barber would've done that for half a loaf of bread per treatment, and probably thrown in some leeches for free!
Or donation (Score:3)
Thousands of pounds for bloodletting? A medieval barber would've done that for half a loaf of bread per treatment, and probably thrown in some leeches for free!
Here in the US we occasionally have blood drives, where the public is invited to give blood for various medical purposes. (Including after a crisis where many people are injured.)
A van drives up, you go in, and about 15 minutes later you're a pint short.
$200,000 to treat 50 people? I bet the Red Cross would do it for much less than that. (Knowing that the donated blood can't be used.)
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Sure, now you're donating a pint of forever chemicals along with your heme.
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Sure, now you're donating a pint of forever chemicals along with your heme.
But the person on the receive end may have a more imminent problem than PFAS.
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They have a more pressing problem than HIV too, it doesn't mean we should give them it.
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That is quite different. On what hand, you are positive to HIV or you are not. On the other hand, the question is how much you are contaminated with PFAS, as everyone is to various degree.
Donated blood may increase your PFAS contamination, but it will not move you from not contaminated to contaminated.
Re:Or donation (Score:5, Informative)
$200,000 to treat 50 people? I bet the Red Cross would do it for much less than that. (Knowing that the donated blood can't be used.)
This isn't about donating blood (or rather not donating blood since it's contaminated). It's about donating plasma which can be recovered from the blood in question. The latter takes closer to an hour and requires a host of special machines, multiple people, as well as laboratory oversight which is where the $200k figure comes from.
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Here in the US we occasionally have blood drives, where the public is invited to give blood for various medical purposes
You give around 500mL of blood, out of a total of 6L. That will remove about 8% of your PFAS. You will need to give 8 times to remove 50%, and 27 times to remove 90%. Of course that does not take into account the slow elimination through liver, and the contamination during that time.
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My nephew cuts himself for free, just so he can feel anything at all.
I told him what's 'wrong with feeling nothing like the rest of us', but now I think the boy might be on to something.
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Thousands of pounds for bloodletting?
I'm sure some of of American readers took that "£100,000 upfront" as the per-person price.
Re: Medical costs are out of control! (Score:2)
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You're off by an order of magnitude, that would be £4k per person, which is still pretty crazy. Assume one appointment every 2 weeks (common max recommended blood donation frequency), that's 24 appointments per year, or £166 per appointment. And the up-front cost would add anoher 50% to that.
Re: Medical costs are out of control! (Score:2)
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Should also point out that Sunday morning math isn't for drawing blood. It's for the complete process of drawing blood and treating and preparing plasma for donation. It's far more complicated than what you do when you show up at the red cross, blood donation takes 15min, plasma donation takes an hour.
Re:Medical costs are out of control! (Score:4, Informative)
That isn't a medical cost to you. It's the total cost of establishing a system of therapy to the entire medical system, and isn't out of control. Jersey is a tiny island without necessary infrastructure to perform this. The costs includes getting additional clinician, nurses, cleaners, and apheresis machines, the latter alone contributes 50% of that 100000 pound up front figure, and the staff contribute to the majority to the 200,000 pound/yr figure and the entire setup can do 50 people per year given staff availability, machine operation, maintenance downtime, etc.
But by all means, let a barber to do it. Medieval times were well known for excellent healthcare, longevity, and low rates of medical complications. /s
Why not dialysis? (Score:5, Interesting)
It clearly works, so why not?
See also: Decreased levels of perfluoroalkyl substances in patients receiving hemodialysis treatment [sciencedirect.com]
The present study demonstrated the significantly decreased levels of PFHxS, PFOA, PFNA, PFDA, PFUnDA, T-PFOS, and L-PFOS in HD patients compared control subjects after adjusting for age, sex, body mass index, smoking history, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, CAD, and cerebrovascular disease. Furthermore, an additional analysis indicated a notable and consistent decrease in PFAS levels, with the HD group exhibiting the lowest concentrations, followed by the stage 5 non-dialysis CKD group, and the...
I don't know about you guys, but I would prefer to keep my blood and merely remove the perfluorinated compounds in it.
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I don't know about you guys, but I would prefer to keep my blood and merely remove the perfluorinated compounds in it.
How much do you think they're taking out? I'd venture to guess no more than what we normally give when donating blood. A pint or so?
Remove some of the blood, along with some of the toxins, and let your body replace the deficit in a couple of days.
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Remove some of the blood, along with some of the toxins, and let your body replace the deficit in a couple of days.
Replacing the blood volume lost might take only a few days, maybe only a few hours, but replacing the red blood cells would take something more like a few weeks. The Red cross puts this at close to two months: https://www.redcrossblood.org/... [redcrossblood.org]
Maybe with some kind of supplements or something there could be more such blood letting sessions per year. A blood substitute of some sort?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Sir Christopher Wren suggested wine and opium as blood substitute.
That sounds awesome, can I have a blood letting with some of this substitute injected in my ve
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After 2 months, 2/3 of your red blood cells would have been replaced (and the components gone to "recycling" via, IIRC, the spleen). By which point, having lost between 1/6 and 1/8 of your blood volume is pretty unimportant.
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Why don't we all fly to the moon? It's just as easy as walking to the corner store right?
There's a HUGE difference in complexity and cost and equipment necessary between donating plasma and performing dialysis. There's also a huge difference in risk, the former being very safe - to the point that its a service offered roadside, the latter having a whole host of potential medical complications.
No I prefer to take something out of my body that it will naturally replenish itself rather than go through medical
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There's a HUGE difference in complexity and cost and equipment necessary between donating plasma and performing dialysis. There's also a huge difference in risk, the former being very safe - to the point that its a service offered roadside, the latter having a whole host of potential medical complications
Well, duh. Which is why it would be justifiable for people with high/toxic levels of PFAS in their blood, only. Doesn't mean it's not a potentially valuable therapy for those most seriously affected.
You seem to think that in such a scenario, everyone would be going down to the corner clinic for a quick dialysis whenever they feel like it. The medical profession, and patients themselves , do cost-benefit analysis for procedures all the time. My ex's father sadly died on a table for a procedure that had a
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Or you could do something safer, cheaper, and recover plasma to donate to others. Do you work for the American medical industry by any chance? Is that why you're trying to absolutely maximise the cost and complexity of treatment?
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So we need special leeches, bred to filter just the bad stuff?
Nothing wrong with leeches, really: they were a common visitor for us Vietnam vets. Painless, really, although the thought was pretty 'orrible.
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Bloodletting never went away, the number of diseases it is used to treat was simply reduced and the ridiculous concept of imbalances of the four humors was rationalized out of medicine. If you have hemochromatosis, however, bloodletting is still a valid therapy.
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Homosapiens Sapiens is a failure.
Actually the fact that bloodletting is an actual therapy used for a variety of medical conditions, including this new problem, and that bloodletting relies on our own bodies biology it shows what an absolute success of a species Homo sapiens actually are. That said, actually many species exhibit the biology that allows bloodletting to have a positive impact on their bodies so we can't take all the credit.
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That's it. It's over. Homosapiens Sapiens is a failure. We deserve to become extinct, we're now devolving back into nonsentient animals. Fucking hell. May as well just call it 'evil spirits' and go looking for witches to burn.
Don't forget to drill your skull to let those evil spirits out, bro. You've clearly been infected by Satan.
Whoah (Score:2)
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Hardly. It's still used medically for certain conditions. Only ones where it is actually useful and based on solid theories not the four humors bunk that goes back to Hippocrates or even earlier. It probably comes from leaving blood sitting around until it separates into layers of red blood cells, platelets and white blood cells, and plasma. That would explain three of the biles, but it's less clear where the fourth comes from. Perhaps from some of the blood coagulating?
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First literal use of the word 'bloodletting' in this century.
Probably won't be the last ...
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Yeah but only because we gave it a fancy name these days like "therapeutic phlebotomy".
Reminds me of high school (Score:2)
I recall in high school those of 18 years of age (or perhaps younger with parental permission) would be encouraged to donate blood in an annual event to replenish the local stockpile of blood for people needing this blood for surgeries and such. One argument made for donation was that the process of donation meant removing any contaminates in the blood and therefore improved the health of the donor. While that kind of made sense to me I was still suspect on the argument since if that was the case then I t
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The lifetime of blood in the "blood bank" is at most a couple of months. If it's not used in the continuing stream of operations, A+E, etc by the end of that time, then it goes
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Which needs putting in to context. It wasn't that long ago - 1994, IIRC - that Scotland stopped the payment of "feu duty" (the "feu" in "feudalism") by home owners in some parts of the country to landowners of some estates. England, OTOH, still has the distinction between "freehold" land ownership and "leasehold", where those same "feu duties" are still payable on an annual or per-century basis from home "owners" to the freeholders of the land.
I'm not sure
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1921 - Irish Free State ; 1922~1923 Civil war (in part over "a statement of faithfulness to the king" - something I've never done either here in Britain and wou
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Back to the future (Score:2)
Makes sense (Score:2)
If you let all your blood out, you won't have to worry about PFAS in it.