{"id":10950,"date":"2015-08-12T08:37:28","date_gmt":"2015-08-12T13:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10950"},"modified":"2015-08-12T08:37:40","modified_gmt":"2015-08-12T13:37:40","slug":"the-teflon-toxin-dupont-and-the-chemistry-of-deception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10950","title":{"rendered":"The Teflon Toxin: Dupont and the Chemistry of Deception"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Teflon Toxin: Dupont and the Chemistry\u00a0of Deception<\/a><\/h3>\n

KEN WAMSLEY SOMETIMES DREAMS<\/u>\u00a0that he\u2019s playing softball again. He\u2019ll be at center field, just like when he played slow pitch back in his teens, or pounding the ball over the fence as the crowd goes wild. Other times, he\u2019s somehow inexplicably back at work in the lab. Wamsley calls them nightmares, these stories that play out in his sleep, but really the only scary part is the end, when \u201cI wake up and I have no rectum anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wamsley is 73. After developing rectal cancer and having surgery to treat it in 2002, he walks slowly and gets up from the bench in his small backyard slowly. His voice, which has a gentle Appalachian lilt, is still animated, though, especially when he talks about his happier days. There were many. While Wamsley knew plenty of people in Parkersburg, West Virginia, who struggled to stay employed, he made an enviable wage for almost four decades at the DuPont plant here. The company was generous, helping him pay for college courses and training him to become a lab analyst in the Teflon division.<\/p>\n

He enjoyed the work, particularly the precision and care it required. For years, he measured levels of a chemical called C8 in various products. The chemical \u201cwas everywhere,\u201d as Wamsley remembers it, bubbling out of the glass flasks he used to transport it, wafting into a smelly vapor that formed when he heated it. A fine powder, possibly C8, dusted the laboratory drawers and floated in the hazy lab air.<\/p>\n

At the time, Wamsley and his coworkers weren\u2019t particularly concerned about the strange stuff. \u201cWe never thought about it, never worried about it,\u201d he said recently. His believed it was harmless, \u201clike a soap. Wash your hands [with it], your face, take a bath.\u201d<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Teflon Toxin: Dupont and the Chemistry\u00a0of Deception KEN WAMSLEY SOMETIMES DREAMS\u00a0that he\u2019s playing softball again. He\u2019ll be at center field, just like when he played slow pitch back in his teens, or pounding the ball over the fence as the crowd goes wild. Other times, he\u2019s somehow inexplicably back at work in the lab. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[8039,8041,128,2954,8038,8040,655,8037,5567,1215],"class_list":["post-10950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-liberty","tag-c8","tag-chemical-toxins","tag-chemicals","tag-deception","tag-dupont","tag-lab-chemicals","tag-propaganda","tag-teflon","tag-the-intercept","tag-toxins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10950"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10951,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10950\/revisions\/10951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}