{"id":428,"date":"2025-07-22T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.southcoastraceway.com\/?p=428"},"modified":"2025-07-27T07:34:25","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T07:34:25","slug":"amid-pfas-fallout-a-maine-doctor-navigates-medical-risks-with-her-patients","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.southcoastraceway.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/22\/amid-pfas-fallout-a-maine-doctor-navigates-medical-risks-with-her-patients\/","title":{"rendered":"Amid PFAS Fallout, a Maine Doctor Navigates Medical Risks With Her Patients"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Lawrence and Penny Higgins of Fairfield, Maine, first learned in 2020 that high levels of toxic chemicals called PFAS taint their home’s well water, they wondered how their health might suffer. They had consumed the water for decades, given it to their pets and farm animals, and used it to irrigate their vegetable garden and fruit trees.<\/p>\n

“We wanted to find out just what it’s going to do to us,” Penny Higgins said. They contacted a couple of doctors, but “we were met with a brick wall. Nobody knew anything.”<\/p>\n

Worse still, she added, they “really didn’t want to hear about it.”<\/p>\n

Many clinicians remain unaware of the health risks linked to PFAS, short for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, despite rising medical and public awareness of the chemicals and their toxicity. PFAS can affect nearly every organ system and linger in bodies for decades, raising risks of cancer, immune deficiencies, and pregnancy complications.<\/p>\n

These “forever chemicals” have been widely used since the 1950s in products including cosmetics, cookware, clothing, carpeting, food packaging, and firefighting foam<\/a>. Researchers say they permeate water systems and soils<\/a> nationwide, with a federal study estimating that at least 45% of U.S. tap water<\/a> is contaminated. PFAS can be detected in the blood of nearly all Americans<\/a>, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.<\/p>\n

Maine was among the first states<\/a> to begin extensive water and soil testing and to try to limit further public exposure to PFAS through policy action<\/a>, after discovering that farms and residences \u2014 like the Higgins’ property \u2014 had been contaminated by land-spreading of wastewater sludge<\/a> containing PFAS. Exposure can also be high for people living near military bases, fire training areas, landfills, or manufacturing facilities.<\/p>\n

In regions where testing reveals PFAS hot spots<\/a>, medical providers can be caught flat-footed and patients left adrift.<\/p>\n

Rachel Criswell, a family practice doctor and environmental health researcher, is working to change that. She was completing her residency in Central Maine around the time that the Higginses and others there began discovering the extent of the contamination. Her medical training at Columbia University included more than a year in Norway researching the effects of PFAS and other chemicals on maternal and infant health.<\/p>\n

When patients began asking about PFAS, Criswell and the state toxicologist offered primary care providers lunchtime presentations on how to respond. Since then, she has fielded frequent PFAS questions from doctors and patients throughout the state.<\/p>\n

Even knowledgeable providers can find it challenging to stay current given rapidly evolving scientific information and few established protocols. “The work I do is exhausting and time-consuming and sometimes frustrating,” Criswell said, “but it’s exactly what I should be doing.”<\/p>\n

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Phil Brown, a Northeastern University sociology professor and a co-director of the PFAS Project Lab<\/a>, said the medical community “doesn’t know a lot about occupational and environmental health,” adding that “it’s a very minimal part of the medical school curriculum<\/a>” and continuing education.<\/p>\n

Courtney Carignan, an environmental epidemiologist at Michigan State University, said learning of PFAS exposure, whether from their drinking water or occupational sources, “is a sensitive and upsetting situation for people” and “it’s helpful if their doctors can take it seriously.”<\/p>\n

Clinical guidance concerning PFAS improved after the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report on PFAS<\/a> in 2022. It found strong evidence associating PFAS with kidney cancer, high cholesterol, reduced birth weights, and lower antibody responses to vaccines, and some evidence linking PFAS to breast and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid and liver dysfunction, and pregnancy-induced hypertension.<\/p>\n

That guidance “revolutionized my practice,” Criswell said. “Instead of being this hand-wavey thing where we don’t know how to apply the research, it brought a degree of concreteness to PFAS exposure that was kind of missing before.”<\/p>\n

The national academies affirmed what Criswell had already been recommending: Doctors should order blood tests for patients with known PFAS exposures.<\/p>\n

Testing for PFAS in blood \u2014 and for related medical conditions if needed \u2014 can help ease patients’ anxiety.<\/p>\n

“There isn’t a day that goes by,” Lawrence Higgins said, “that we don’t think and wonder when our bodies are going to shut down on us.”<\/p>\n

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\u2018Devastating but Incredibly Helpful’<\/strong><\/p>\n

After finding out in 2021 that his family was exposed to PFAS<\/a> through sludge spread on their Unity, Maine, farm decades earlier, Adam Nordell discovered that “it was exceedingly difficult” to get tested. “Our family doctor had not heard of PFAS and didn’t know what the test was,” he said. A lab technician needed coaching from an outside expert to source the test. The lab analyzing the samples had a backlog that left the family waiting three months.<\/p>\n

“The results were devastating but incredibly helpful,” Nordell said. Their blood serum levels for PFAS were at roughly the 99th percentile nationally, far higher than their well-water levels would have predicted \u2014 indicating that additional exposure was probably coming from other sources such as soil contact, dust, and food.<\/p>\n

Blood levels of PFAS between 2 and 20 nanograms per milliliter may be problematic, the national academies reported. In highly contaminated settings, blood levels can run upward of 150 times the 20-ng\/mL risk threshold.<\/p>\n

Nordell and his family had been planning to remain on the farm and grow crops less affected by PFAS, but the test results persuaded them to leave. “Knowledge is power,” Nordell said, and having the blood data “gave us agency.”<\/p>\n

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