Emerging PFAS in Household Exposure Media from the American Healthy Homes Survey II
On this page:
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent environmental pollutants associated with a wide range of potential health effects and known to be present in a wide range of exposure-relevant media. Approximately twenty commonly-identified “legacy” PFAS have been well characterized and examined in many environmental media, but there are known to be thousands of emerging PFAS in industrial and commercial products. These species are also able to transform into additional novel forms or even “legacy” PFAS themselves. As a result, relying solely on “legacy” PFAS using traditional analytical methods severely limits efforts to fingerprint PFAS sources and characterize the totality of PFAS exposures.
Tap water is a major source of PFAS exposure to the general population with additional household sources, including textiles and consumer products, also contributing to PFAS exposure. House dust both aggregates persistent chemicals, such as PFAS, present in the home, and can serve as an additional exposure source. We applied non-targeted analysis (NTA) to identify PFAS present in 240 paired drinking water and house dust samples collected during the Department of Housing and Urban Development – Environmental Protection Agency American Healthy Homes Survey (AHHS) II nationwide sampling campaign. We report on the presence of over forty emerging PFAS in drinking water and house dust, and apply network modeling to test for potential relationships between legacy and emerging species both within and across paired media. The network modeling reveals groups of emerging PFAS which are likely associated with specific source profiles. We further apply quantitative NTA methods to estimate PFAS concentrations for species lacking analytical standards using a collection of PFAS surrogates, and we assess relative body burden attributable to tap water versus house dust.