More than 20 new ‘forever chemicals’ found in Sydney tap water
By Caitlin Fitzsimmons
More than 20 new types of PFAS have been found in Sydney tap water that were not previously detected, while an expert panel convened by NSW Health has concluded that the forever chemicals are low risk and the health effects do not warrant blood testing.
The panel concluded that the effects of PFAS on human health appear to be small, and recommended against blood testing to measure an individual’s PFAS level or clinical interventions to reduce it. This puts NSW Health, which has accepted all the panel’s recommendations, at odds with emerging international best practice about how to manage the environmental pollutant.
In late July, before the expert panel reported, NSW Health held a webinar for general practitioners in the Blue Mountains, which included a discussion about whether patients should reduce exposure by donating blood.
Master fly casting instructor Peter Morse practising his casting in Wentworth Falls Lake on Monday. He does not catch or eat fish from the lake.Credit: Wolter Peeters
The hour-long webinar was hosted by Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant to guide GPs and other healthcare professionals in “supporting patients with concerns about PFAS exposure”.
Professor Nick Buckley, an expert in clinical pharmacology at the University of Sydney and one of six presenters besides Chant in the webinar, told attendees the levels of PFAS exposure in humans were mostly “tiny traces” and there was limited or no evidence for a strong link with human disease, including cancer and high cholesterol.
“People should not be getting terribly worried about PFAS – I know that’s a really hard thing,” Buckley said. “There’s a lot of reasons to think that we’re spending a lot of time on something that actually isn’t very important for people’s health.”
The webinar presented a case study of a 60-year-old woman who wanted to know if her high cholesterol was due to her high PFAS levels, measured at 19 nanograms per millilitre of blood for PFOS, 2 ng/ml for PFOA and 11 ng/ml for PFHxS. If she were in the US, her total PFAS levels of 32 would be above the threshold of 20 at which the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) recommends further testing and screening.
The expert panel convened by NSW Health specifically rejected the NASEM guidance as “not appropriate to guide clinical management”.
Professor Alison Jones, executive director at the Sunshine Coast Health Institute, told the webinar that she would focus on the patient’s cholesterol and cardiovascular risk. “I would not be doing anything about the PFOS, PFOA or any other thing that starts with P and has F to follow – because of relative risk,” Jones said.
PFAS are a family of synthetic chemicals prized for their resistance to heat, grease and water, and used in a wide range of everyday products such as stain-resistant fabrics, cleaning products and firefighting foams. Now found in the blood of almost every Australian, they are often dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down naturally, and can persist in the environment and human body for decades.
In 2024, the US Environmental Protection Agency concluded that PFAS were “an urgent threat to public health and the environment” and exposure to certain PFAS posed “significant risk to human health, including cancer, even at very low levels”. The agency imposed stricter PFAS limits for US drinking water, which have been maintained under the Trump administration, and recommended blood testing for people with occupational exposure or who live in contaminated areas.
NASEM has also found that certain PFAS, specifically PFOA, are carcinogenic to humans, while the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified PFOA as carcinogenic to humans and PFOS as possibly carcinogenic.
In the webinar, Buckley said the NASEM guidelines on sensible screening for an individual were “pretty terrible” and described IARC as “just some subgroup of the WHO”, not the World Health Organisation itself.
Buckley chaired the expert health panel for PFAS for the Australian government in 2018. He told the webinar he had looked over the state of research since then, and “not much” had changed.
Dr Nicholas Chartres, a senior research fellow in the school of pharmacy at the University of Sydney who viewed the webinar, told this masthead it would have been most appropriate for the NSW Health webinar to present the findings of the US EPA and NASEM reviews alongside the IARC evaluations.
“Government advice should not rely on individual experts, but rather rigorous, transparent reviews that reflect the most current science, when available,” he said.
NASEM’s review was more rigorous and up-to-date than the 2018 Australian panel, Chartres said, taking in the 139 human studies that had been published since then.
A NSW Health spokesperson said the webinar was to support local clinicians to provide information and give them a chance to share case studies and ask questions.
STOP PFAS convener Jon Dee in Leura.Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong
Jon Dee, from Blue Mountains community group STOP PFAS, said: “The PFAS in our drinking water was an Erin Brockovich-level contamination, yet NSW Health is downplaying this and ignoring a huge amount of international evidence about PFAS health risks.”
Blood donations
Buckley told the webinar about a third of PFAS in a human body would be in the blood stream, and if individuals were concerned about their PFAS levels and wanted to be proactive in lowering it, they could consider donating blood.
“If you quietly said ‘you’re welcome to give blood and you will get rid of 3 per cent of the PFAS in your body every time you give blood’, I actually think it’s not a bad idea”, Buckley said. He added that it was “a futile exercise … at one level” because it would not deliver health benefits, and it could cause mixed messages and concerns about the blood supply.
Jones told the webinar she disagreed with blood donation to lower PFAS because it could cause persistent anaemia and there was “no proven causality between PFASes and adverse health effects”.
A randomised clinical trial of 285 Victorian firefighters in 2019 found donating blood lowered PFAS levels, while the PFAS Health Study at the Australian National University has identified menstruation as one of the reasons why PFAS levels are lower in Australian women than men at population level
The expert panel findings released on Tuesday said, “interventions that reduce blood PFAS are of uncertain benefit and may cause harm”.
Sydney tap water
Residents in the Blue Mountains have been exposed to high levels of PFAS, especially PFOS from firefighting foam, in drinking water for at least 17 years and probably up to 32 years. Water with PFAS levels above safe limits had been supplying 78,000 residents from Mount Victoria to Glenbrook, according to Sydney Water, until the pipeline to a contaminated dam was disconnected last year.
Last week, the NSW Environment Protection Authority put out a warning that people should limit their consumption of fish from Wentworth Falls Lake to one serve of redfin perch per week and all other fish species to two serves a week because of the results of testing of surface water and fish for PFAS.
Peter Morse, a master fly casting instructor, was out at Wentworth Falls Lake on Monday honing his skills. He said he never catches fish in the lake mainly because of concerns about urban run-off from nearby houses, but noted the lake was stocked with trout annually and they were always fished out by the end of the season.
“It’s a popular spot for kids in the mountains to go fishing, and I suspect if they catch a trout, they’re going to take it home for mum to cook,” Morse said.
On Tuesday, University of NSW researchers released their findings of PFAS testing in Sydney tap water in 2024, with an article published in the journal Chemosphere. The samples were analysed per drinking water catchment and found to be highest around North Richmond, potentially because of contamination from the air base.
They found a total of 31 PFAS types in Sydney tap water, including 21 not previously detected. The detected PFAS included 3:3 FTCA, thought to be only the second global detection in any drinking water supply, and 6:2 diPAP, previously found in bottled water and now detected in tap water for the first time.
Lead researcher Professor William Alexander Donald said the health effects of 3:3 FTCA were unknown, but there was some evidence to suggest that 6:2 diPAP caused thyroid and reproductive issues.
The National Health and Medical Research Council updated the Australian drinking water standard in June, covering five main types of PFAS. The UNSW team found PFOS in Sydney tap water at 6 parts per trillion, which is below Australian limits but above the US standard.
Donald said one of the most interesting findings was that Sydney tap water had high levels of PFBA, a short-chain PFAS that is being used as a replacement for the banned substances, PFOS and PFOA.
“It’s more mobile in the environment, so it shouldn’t persist as long, but across all the samples it has the highest average concentration,” Donald said. “It shows this idea that you can make tweaks to these chemicals to get around using the banned substances, but then … it ends up in our tap water.”
A Sydney Water spokesperson said drinking water from all nine of its water filtration plants was safe to drink and met the guidelines.
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