On World Cancer Day, February 4, EU medical professionals and PFAS experts met with members of the European Commission and the European Parliament to share their concerns about the impact of PFAS on health and to highlight PFAS-free innovation happening in the medical sector.
The event, ‘From Health Protection to Economic Opportunity – PFAS-free Medical Innovation in the EU’, hosted by MEP Tomislav Sokol and co-hosted by MEP Sirpa Pietikäinen from the Parliament’s European People’s Party, was widely attended by MEPs and their teams, EU Commission officials, PFAS experts and NGOs including CHEM Trust, Tegengif and Health Care Without Harm Europe.
Speakers included medical doctors, a researcher looking into PFAS-free coating solutions, and a chemicals policy expert.
MEP Sokol highlighted the huge financial costs of PFAS pollution stating that ‘we must get rid of PFAS’, and that ‘we should incentivise innovation to find substitutes’, whilst emphasising the need to provide pragmatic transition times. According to the roundtable speakers, innovation to transition away from PFAS is already underway and the proposal to phase-out PFAS, currently being considered in the EU, already provides ample transition times to find even more alternatives where they do not yet exist.
In the medical sector, PFAS are used in medical devices such as catheters, stents, surgical instruments, and diagnostic equipment, as well as in medical textiles, anaesthetic gases, and asthma inhalers. This makes the sector a significant source of PFAS emissions. You can read more about PFAS here.
During the event, Niek Sperna Weiland, anaesthesiologist at Amsterdam University Medical Center, outlined how in the Netherlands, medical practitioners are already moving away from PFAS by switching to intravenous anaesthesia.
Dr. Sperna Weiland said, ‘phasing out anaesthetic gases in the medical sector results in a huge reduction in PFAS emissions. We believe it’s possible to roll out this practice in other European countries and in other medical settings.’ His team’s approach in the Netherlands has already led to an 87% reduction in traditional anaesthetic gases nationwide.
Klára Matoušková, a medical doctor and scientist in environmental chemicals, highlighted the adverse health effects linked to PFAS exposure, including impacts on the immune system, liver damage, and certain cancers such as kidney and testicular cancer.
‘As a medical doctor and as part of a community of thousands of medical doctors, I am deeply concerned about the health impact of PFAS exposure’, said Dr. Matoušková.
Chemicals Policy Expert at Ökopol, Andreas Ahrens, said restricting PFAS as a group and across the market could be a vital opportunity for the EU to lead the transition away from PFAS, arguing that ‘the universal PFAS restriction sends a strong signal to EU companies to develop PFAS-free alternatives’.
This echoes the message in a letter, sent to the EU Commission by over 150 medical professionals last year, which argued that the restriction would be a vital tool to incentivise and boost innovation in the sector. Read more about the letter in our blog.
Ralph Wilken, Head of the Surface Technology Division at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM (Bremen, Germany), further highlighted ongoing innovation in PFAS replacement technologies, that can also be applied in the medical sector. He detailed his work developing PFAS-free coating solutions for specific medical devices, showcasing technologies that deliver key performance properties, including low-friction (gliding) characteristics for guidewires and hydrophobic non-stick and easy-to-clean coatings for various applications. He noted that ‘we have more or less a tool kit for substitution of PFAS in medical devices’ and called for research and development to fill all requirements.
In MEP Pietikäinen’s closing remarks, she stressed that a long-term regulatory perspective, more specifically a phase-out, would be necessary for stimulating PFAS-free innovation.
CHEM Trust is calling for a strong and comprehensive group restriction on PFAS with minimal derogations to ensure that the health of people and nature is better protected. Find our full list of asks for the Universal PFAS Restriction here in our response to ECHA’s public consultation on the restriction dossier.
