- Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more than a decade ago, but the story of DuPont’s long involvement with C8 has never been fully told. Over the past 15 years, as lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle — culminating as the first of approximately 3,500 personal injury claims comes to trial in September — a long trail of documents has emerged that casts new light on C8, DuPont, and the fitful attempts of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with a threat to public health.
So DuPont could have definitely done a lot better job of protecting their workers. Just as a matter of curiosity I calculated the LD50 based off of the monkey experiment. They gave the lethal dose at 1 oz./150 lb. That is equal to 28.3495 g/68.0389 kg. .4167g/kg or more standardly 416mg/kg. Aspirin's lethal dose is 200mg/kg to give perspective. It looks like doses of chronic exposure and through inhalation would be a lot more important and would have affected the workers a lot more than a consumer buying Teflon, but this article isn't written with that in mind.
No, it's more about the deception and sheer irresponsibility. The comparison is to tobacco but I think that asbestos is a better comparison. I mean, if you have to pick just one. When you think about it, there are many examples, and they all come from the same corporate mind-set. Perhaps it's time to rethink how corporations function.