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wagwang 3 hours ago

What the fuck... what's stopping this from poisoning our water supply?

theMMaI 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The absolute miniscule volume

wagwang 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Pfas are measured in ppb or even ppt

daedrdev 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Good thing there are 3*10^21 atoms of H2O in a water drop

Aloisius 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

PFAS are expressed as a mass fraction, not mole fraction.

wagwang 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ok and there are around that many atoms of pfas per tear drop?

2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
terminalshort 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And water supply is measured in km^3

wagwang 2 hours ago | parent [-]

so 1 liter of eye drop per 1ppt of km^3

terminalshort 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That would be 1 liter of the active ingredient, not 1 liter of the eye drop. Also I don't believe that 1 ppt of this stuff is harmful when people are putting it directly in their eyes without severe harm.

jaggederest 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's only a single ingredient, these eyedrops are 100% pure PFAS

And people put asbestos on their christmas trees back in the day - I don't think "obvious harm" is a high enough standard.

terminalshort 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think obvious harm at 1 trillion parts per trillion is a pretty good standard to meet if you want to claim harm at 1 part per trillion.

wagwang 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe, maybe not, maybe like teflon, the real poison is an intermediate ingredient, but I think its bullshit that we're just creating chemicals that linger in our water supply for eternity. You literally cannot find anyone in America without traces of the dangerous variant of the PFAS in their blood stream. Like every sip of water is some ridiculous dupont cocktail and we have to tolerate it because people have dry eyes and want non stick pans. Why cant you just use theratears?

cyberax an hour ago | parent [-]

> You literally cannot find anyone in America without traces of the dangerous variant of the PFAS in their blood stream.

You also can't find anybody in the world without traces of lead, arsenic, uranium, radium, and other chemical elements in their blood.

> Why cant you just use theratears?

Because they don't work.

OutOfHere 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's most definitely going to accumulate inside the body, although slowly.

autoexec 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How many gallons of Miebo/Evotears do you think are manufactured every year?

dotancohen 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Multiply that by the t in ppt. How many trillions of gallons of water do you think an average city uses every year?

andy99 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Is all the Miebo/Evotears that’s manufactured being dumped directly into the drinking water supply?

dotancohen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Where do you think it goes after it gets to your eyes? The valid choices are:

A. Absorbed into your body forever.

B. Becomes a part of the water cycle.

C. Is broken down.

And even choice A eventually becomes choice B, ideally after significant time though.

autoexec 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One thing you can be sure of is that the vats of PFAS being produced year after year for this drug aren't going away anytime soon. They're called "forever chemicals" for a reason.

andy99 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Being dispersed in the environment is not the same as being concentrated into our drinking water supply with each measure resulting in 1ppt contamination of a trillion measures of water.

wagwang 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How do you think pfas got into the water supply in the first place.

jaggederest 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Largely firefighting foams, industrial and manufacturing, and landfill sources, but it's still an interesting problem. They don't really break down (that's why they're so useful both in a materials science sense and as a medication) which implies they'll stick around for an extremely long time.

cyberax an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Teflon is also PFAS. The whole PFAS scare is overblown.