Mariah Blake’s new book – They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals (Crown, 2025) – is the result of a ten year investigation of the chemical industry’s campaign to hide the dangers of forever chemicals.
It’s also the story of regular American citizens on the frontlines of an epic public health crisis.
In 2014, after losing several friends and relatives to cancer, Michael Hickey, an unassuming insurance underwriter in Hoosick Falls, New York, began to suspect that the local water supply was polluted.
When he tested his tap water, he discovered dangerous levels of forever chemicals. This set off a chain of events that led to one hundred million Americans learning their drinking water was tainted.
Although the discovery came as a shock to most, the U.S. government and the manufacturers of these toxic chemicals – used in everything from lipstick and cookware to children’s clothing – had known about their hazards for decades.
They Poisoned the World tells the story of this cover-up, tracing its roots back to the Manhattan Project and through the postwar years, as industry scientists discovered that these chemicals refused to break down and were saturating the blood of virtually every human being.
By the 1980s, manufacturers were secretly testing their workers and finding links to birth defects, cancer, and other serious diseases.
At every step, the industry’s deceptions were aided by the federal government’s appallingly lax regulatory system – a system that Blake says has made us all guinea pigs in a vast, uncontrolled chemistry experiment.
“We are in the midst of the gravest contamination crisis in human history,” Blake told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a class of about 9,000 chemicals that do not break down in the environment. They persist in the environment for hundreds or even thousands of years. The ones that have been tested are extremely toxic, even at low doses. And they are polluting the entire planet.”
“These chemicals are in the blood of virtually every living being. They are in ecosystems in every part of the world. One 2022 study looked at the levels of the two best known PFAS in rainwater around the world and they found that even in the most remote parts of the world, places like the Tibetan plateau, the levels of these two chemicals exceeded safety standards for drinking water around the world.”
“That means that everywhere around the world the levels were high enough to be harmful to human health and the environment. They concluded based on this that the entire planet was outside the safe operating space for humanity. And these are very well respected scientists who conducted this study.”
“This problem had been building for more than eighty years. But the only reason the world knows these chemicals exist is because of this humble family of West Virginia farmers – the Tennants.”
“The Tennants sold some of their land to DuPont for a landfill. DuPont runs a factory in Parkersburg, West Virginia that makes Teflon, which is a form of PFAS and it is also made with PFAS. After the family sold to DuPont the land, their cows started sprouting tumors, vomiting blood and going blind. And pretty soon they were dying off faster than the family could bury them. When they dissected the carcasses of these animals, they found their organs were bright green, their teeth were black. They were convinced that the landfill was to blame.”
“So they ultimately sued DuPont. This exposed this sweeping coverup involving a forever chemical known as PFOA. It was clear from the documents in their lawsuit and a subsequent lawsuit filed by a Parkersburg resident that DuPont and 3M, which manufactured this chemical, knew it was in the blood of virtually everyone in the world, that it doesn’t break down in nature, that it was highly toxic. But they had buried most of these findings.”
“It was only because of this family in West Virginia that the world even learned that these chemicals existed.”
You are going to be in an event next week in Cincinnati with Rob Billott, the lawyer who brought the case in Parkersburg.
“Rob Billott was a corporate attorney who usually represented chemical companies. He only agreed to take on the Tennant family’s case because his grandmother lived in Parkersburg and some of his fondest childhood memories were from milking cows and riding horses on a farm in Parkersburg, West Virginia.”
“He took on this case and ended up settling the case. But instead of settling the case and walking away, as many attorneys would do, he was so troubled by what he found that he decided to collect all of the documents he received in discovery and send them to the Environmental Protection Agency. And he continued from that point on to fight to draw attention to these chemicals. He also organized a class action lawsuit on behalf of Parkersburg residents that ended in a landmark settlement. As part of that settlement, DuPont agreed to fund a community health study.”
“DuPont did so because they believed that the study would find no health effects. They ended up getting 80 percent of the residents to participate in the study. And they were able to link this particular forever chemical to six serious diseases. A lot of what has happened since flows from that particular study. It was one of the largest, most sophisticated health studies in U.S. history.”
There are two ways to read your book. One is – get depressed. After all, as you say, they poisoned the world. But then again, your book is filled with regular Americans standing up and fighting back – starting with the Tennants and with Michael Hickey of upstate New York.
“Michael Hickey is an insurance underwriter. He lives in a small village in upstate New York. His father was a school bus driver who worked night shifts at a local factory that made Teflon coated fabric. He was this incredibly beloved figure in the community. Every year he would buy Christmas presents for kids on his bus. He was known for picking up people’s tab when he saw them in restaurants. Michael’s father died a terrible death from kidney cancer.”
“The water contamination in Hoosick Falls, New York, where the Hickeys lived, had only come to light because Michael had tested the drinking water. It turned out that the drinking water had extremely high levels of PFOA. The levels were about 100 times the EPA’s current safety level for this chemical.”
“I traveled to Hoosick Falls. Michael was not what I expected. He’s a clean cut insurance underwriter with a fear of public speaking. He had never taken much interest in environmental issues. The first time I met him, he told me that he got his news from ESPN.”
“And yet, by that point he was spearheading a fight against several giant multinational corporations and government agencies to get his community clean drinking water. Other residents who were also unlikely activists, had become involved. And one of the people who played a crucial role was a local doctor, Marcus Martinez. His family had run the main local medical practice. And they had documented unusually high rates of rare aggressive cancers in their patients. There was a high school music teacher, a young mother who had put everything she had into a dream home and then she discovered her private well was heavily polluted.”
“These people had become activists, although they wouldn’t call themselves that. They turned out to be remarkably effective advocates. As a result of what happened in Hoosick Falls, millions of people around the country started learning their drinking water was polluted.”
“It took years of struggle. They sacrificed a lot. And there was a lot of suffering along the way. But they managed to accomplish virtually everything they had set out to accomplish.”
“One of the chief accomplishments was a class action lawsuit that ended in a landmark $65 million settlement. This is a community with 3,000 residents at the time. That’s more per capita than any other PFAF litigation settlement anywhere in the country.”
“As I was reporting that story, millions of people were learning that their drinking water was contaminated. And other people around the country who had no interest in politics or environmental issues started pushing for change on these issues. Firefighters, factory workers, farmers, suburban moms – they wound up achieving some remarkable things that I wouldn’t have envisioned were possible when I started writing this book.”
Has there ever been a criminal investigation into this matter?
“The Justice Department did open a criminal investigation into DuPont in the early 2000s, but it was later closed. There was an EPA case, which led to the largest settlement in EPA history.”
Do we know why the criminal investigation was closed?
“No. There was momentum in the 2000s, but then when the financial crisis hit, this issue seemed to disappear from the radar and didn’t re-emerge until 2016 or so. I have tried hard to figure out what happened to that criminal investigation, but I really don’t know.”
“Criminal charges have been brought overseas. States have passed bans on sewage sludge. In Texas, there is a legislation that would criminalize selling sewage sludge that has higher than a certain level of PFAS in it.”
“By the way, the U.S. government knew these chemicals were toxic as early as 1945 and at the same time, they knew they were accumulating in human blood.”
“The companies knew these chemicals were toxic by the 1960s. By the 1970s, they knew they were accumulating in the blood of people all across the United States. And they would subsequently do these comprehensive studies that looked at blood from people all around the world, including remote rural China. They took thousands of blood samples. And they also had archived blood samples from past medical studies. And the only blood they could find that didn’t contain these chemicals was archived blood that was collected from Korean war vets before 1952.”
“The chemical companies quickly realized that these chemicals did not break down in the environment. One internal industry document showed that a certain PFAS had a half life of a million years, which is longer than plutonium. It’s a time scale more akin to nuclear waste. They found that these chemicals had devastating effects on lab animals. One study on monkeys showed all of the monkeys dying.”
“One of the most shocking things to me was the degree to which these companies used their own employees as lab rats. They began monitoring the health of employees who were working with these chemicals. They quickly found links between these chemicals and all kinds of illnesses, including kidney cancer, prostate cancer, organ damage, they attack the immune system, thyroid function – and the list goes on.”
“The most shocking study involved pregnant workers. 3M discovered that PFOA caused birth defects in the eyes of rats. In the 1980s, 3M launched what it called a pregnancy outcome study. They monitored the pregnancies of workers in Teflon plants and found that two out of seven pregnant workers gave birth to children with serious facial deformities similar to those found in rats. And they concluded that this was statistically significant excess of the birth defect rate in the general population, which I believe is one in 3,000. But rather than alert the public and the government, they buried these findings and continued to expose workers and the rest of us to these chemicals.”
The industry, including 3M, is moving away from this class of chemicals. But the rule in the United States is – you can go to market with a chemical without first proving that it’s safe. How do we know that these newly introduced chemicals are any safer?
“You have this tidal wave of litigation. You have state level regulations that ban the entire class of chemicals – all 9,000 chemicals. Traditionally in the United States, when one chemical is banned, industry simply replaces it with another chemical in the same class that has similar properties. But now, governments are regulating an entire class of chemicals. The companies moving away from these chemicals are moving away from the entire class of chemicals. That reduces the risk that one bad chemical is being replaced by another bad chemical.”
“3M, the world’s largest manufacturer of PFAS, has announced that it will quit producing the entire class of these chemicals by the end of the year. Forty major retailers with $1.7 trillion in combined sales have committed to eliminating or reducing these chemicals in their packaging – companies like Apple, Amazon, McDonald’s, Home Depot, Taco Bell and Dick’s Sporting Goods. And they are committing to moving away from the entire class of chemicals.”
“Is there risk that some of the new chemicals will have problems? Yes. But the way states and the EU are approaching regulation of these chemicals makes it much less likely.”
“It has the potential to change the way we approach regulating chemicals. States are not only banning PFAS chemicals, but phthalates and phenols, for example. There are certain groups of chemicals that are known to be harmful as a group. Traditionally, we regulated them chemical by chemical. Now that is changing.”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Mariah Blake, see 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 21(11), May 19, 2025, print edition only.]