At the time, no one was talking about PFAS in pesticides, and Lasee didn’t know what to make of his results. That changed last year, when he began to see news coming out of two states.
First, in December 2020, the nonprofit organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) tested a jug of Anvil 10+10, an insecticide that the state of Massachusetts has sprayed on millions of acres for decades to kill mosquitos. They found it contained multiple PFAS, including about 250 ppt of PFOA. Like PFOS, the EPA’s health advisory limit for PFOA is so low (.004 ppt), it’s nearly zero. When the state Department of Environmental Protection ran its own tests on a larger set of samples, it found eight different PFAS, including PFOA and PFOS.
