Challenges in monitoring PFAS

PFAS can be harmful to health. Exposure in drinking water or food, for example, can lead to liver damage or damage the immune system. But how exactly do you detect PFAS?  Ruben Kause from Wageningen Food Safety Research talks about the challenges.

As a monitoring specialist, Kause himself does not estimate the toxicity of a specific type of PFAS. He only measures: “I cannot answer the question whether PFAS in food poses a major public health problem, because I am not a toxicologist. That question lies with the RIVM. I purely look at the question of how can you measure different types of PFAS.”

Sources of PFAS

Wageningen Food Safety Research looks at numerous possible sources for this: “We measure everything around the food chain,” says Kause. “From soil to drinking water, from food to packaging materials. We mainly ingest different types of water, from surface water and groundwater to drinking water. But also many foods, often of animal origin such as meat and fish. Fish in particular are a known source of PFAS, especially if they are caught around areas with a lot of industry. But we also take measurements on vegetables.”

A number of known PFAS variants are continuously monitored, says the researcher: “We make a distinction between PFAS that we monitor as standard and PFAS types that fall outside our regular monitoring program. A number of types of PFAS that have been widely used and are known to cause health damage are included in our regular program. With our measuring system we look very specifically at those specific components. But there are more than six thousand different types, so we are also investigating targeted targeting methods to measure more unknown PFAS variants.”

“We will also eventually have to switch to new measuring methods in order to properly measure all PFAS variants in which we become interested. For example, I conduct research into the detection of so-called monoPAPs. Those are phosphates. This species proved difficult to detect, but we succeeded.”

Would you like to know more about the challenges of monitoring PFAS? Ruben Kause gives a lecture together with Stefan van Leeuwen during the LabNL trade fair. A visit to the fair and participation in the seminar is free. Register directly via this link.