Meat contaminated with PFAS – Ständerat wants to soften sales ban – expert warns

by BezugssystemCH1903

10 comments
  1. Tipp: St. Galler Bratwurst mues mit extra Senf behandelt werde, zum die Gfahr abwende.

  2. how about the Ständeräte go ahead with good example and switch the mensa in the parlament to using the contaminated meat as ingredients for the forseeable future – after all, there is no concerns.

    It should be documented who eats dishes and who only demands the loudest that the rest of the population eat the contaminated products.

  3. Perhaps a warning label like the ones on cigarettes would help?

  4. This is madness 🤯. The worst thing is that I believe they’ll succeed with their plan…

  5. Of course they want to soften the sales ban. The economy would suffer if we’d not buy that meat. The healthcare cost might increase, but that’s totally unrelated.

    Best part is right in the summary:

    >Fleisch von PFAS-belasteten Bauernhöfen soll mit unbelastetem Fleisch vermischt werden dürfen – das Endprodukt muss aber die Grenzwerte einhalten.

    That basically means: “We are going to mix contaminated meat with regular meat, that way we can sell all the PFAS-Meat while staying below the limits”. Genius.

    The quote is great too:

    >Die Höchstwerte für Fleisch und Fisch sind zu abrupt eingeführt worden.

    Maybe the limits were introduced to prevent serious impact on the populations health. Now we know that we can just mix

    The ETH scientist says that the “half-life” is four years. Within four years you excrete halve of the PFAS from your (first) consumption, we eat about 70kg of meat per year on average, that means there wont ever be a time where there is no PFAS in your body. I hope it gets along nicely with the microplastic in our reproductive system.

    But who needs scientists when you have Benedikt Würth, we just need rules, okay? Warning of the potential hazard is just alarmism. PFAS has to follow Benedikts rules and we will be good.

  6. Two things can be true at the same time:

    1. PFAS spread/pollution is a long term danger which absolutely needs to be taken care of by reducing emissions in the environment.
    2. PFAS thresholds for sales are set completely arbitrarily in a way that has no links to actual health effects.

    Unfortunately PFAS is a vast category of chemicals and pretty much anywhere you look for it at this point, you find it. It’s never zero, and whether you find it “above the threshold allowed for sales” just depends on what you decided the threshold to be. Because PFAS health risks are still understudied and vary greatly depending on types of chemicals (which simple thresholds often don’t really measure), it’s just a random line that’s been decided upon. Eating some stuff that’s under the threshold could even be more dangerous than some stuff that’s over the threshold, if it’s the wrong kind of PFAS chemicals in a larger amount.

    Does taking this meat off the market meaningfully help in fighting the PFAS crisis? Maybe, it could help align incentives for farmers and consumers to take political action against the cause of the pollution (which, in large part, does not come from the farmers). Or maybe it won’t and it will just push people against environmental causes because Switzerland in general really likes its farmers, and this can easily be spun as “the state punishes the innocent little guys again”.

  7. Everything is contaminated with PFAS, us included.

    But shoutout to the previous and current CEOs, executives, lobbyists, etc. from Dupont and similar traitors that actively lobbied to let those molecules be “legal” while ignoring the studies they asked for.

    The reason/justification behind it ? “The next generation will find a solution”.

    LMAO :]

    The solution is getting massively poisoned because it’s making our lives slightly more comfortable. And not just us, but Nature in its whole, as it is in our water cycle.

    “We can avoid reality, but we cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality” + “Fuck around (20th century) and find out (21th century)”.

  8. This is awful and people should be aware what politicians are up to. A propos abruptly. I had close relatives that *abruptly* died of cancer and I’M ABSOLUTELY INTERESTED in lowering chances of my and my children’s premature death, even if that kills the meat industry in one little corner of this country. The cancer risk of pfas is really high and the costs of it, financially and socially, are gigantic. Put on your glasses and look at the numbers for the next decade or two, not the next quartal, please.

    We all read articles of cancer fights, more or less succesful, but the truth is far from it. Young people die of cancer, in a matter of months. 

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