07 Jun 2005, 03:46:00 PM
Reporter: Laura Sparkes
The sizzle of food in your frypan, it always smells so good but be careful what you breathe in.
Who would have guessed that the fumes from this non-stick frypan in most Australian households, might give you the flu, dangerous chemicals linked to cancer, infertility, thyroid and immune problems in laboratory animals and they can even kill birds.
Bob Symons is a scientist at the National Measurement Institute. He says these chemicals or perfluorinated compounds, that come off over-heated frypans are in the blood of 95 percent of Americans. He wants to study our population's blood and research levels in food and the environment.
"Because these compounds are very persistent it takes a long time for them to break down and the more were exposed the greater levels they're going to be in our blood… The longer they stay in the blood in our bodies the more chance they have to interact with ourselves and different organs."
The dangerous chemicals start coming off the pan when reaching temperatures between 315 and 350 degrees. After this you may get the flu. Let's see how quickly it gets to the danger point without any food in it. Bob uses an infrared thermometer... and guess what? It only took 2 minutes and 45 seconds.
Mother of two Moa Alfven was shocked at this result in her own kitchen.
Now lets test the temperature while cooking bacon. This time it took 4 minutes 21 to reach the dangerous levels - a minute and a half longer.
Go and buy a non-stick frypan and you wont find a health warning anywhere, however they do caution against cooking over 260 degrees celsius but don't say why. But go to Dupont's teflon website and eventually you will find a warning of "flu-like symptoms, chills, fever and sore throat from vapors emitted during hot cooking buried in the fine print.
"They haven't put a warning on the pans because thats where the people would see it and it would stop people from buying the pans." Tim Cropp is a senior scientist with the environmental working group, an association in the US that is calling for a consumer warning of all non-stick frypans. "There's no requirement for anyone to be notified of the problems with these pans because most of it falls under consumer safety and because consumers aren't able to complain about this because they don't even know when they've been harmed, theres no action."
"We may not kill ourselves directly we may not even feel the acute effects of this chemical soup we live in, but what we do is impact on the future generations of our children growing up." Dr Marianne Lloyd-Smith is national coordinator of the National Toxics Network. She says its not just the flu we should worry about... lab animal studies have uncovered severe health problems. "They've been shown by research from some of the manufacturers to cause cancer, to cause liver disease, reproductive problems and a whole load of developmental problems as well."
The fumes are also known to kill birds. Carly McGee was boiling meat for 90 minutes on high heats, in a non-stick saucepan, with her healthy young peach faced parrot in the kitchen. "Two hours after we cooked he got a little uncordinated and dizzy and so we put him back in the cage didn't know what was up then I looked up and he was actually dead in the bottom of the cage."
Carly pondered why her bird died but after searching the web she found 47,000 sites about over heated non-stick pans killing birds. She's now concerned for her unborn child and now only cooks using stainless steel. "I don't even like to breathe in say the cleaning products that I clean with, or somebody smoking a cigarette, let alone something that can kill a bird, but if you smoke a cigarette around a bird, he doesn't drop dead in a cage."
But don't think its just non-stick frypans...these chemicals are in many other products. Bob looks around Moa's house - pointing out where they hide. "The carpet has stain resistant coatings that have perfluorinated compounds… your chairs and potentially your couch could have stain resistant coatings… and maybe even the leather jacket your wearing. The sandwich maker here has the teflon on both sides non stick coating and probably in your drawer here you've probably got utensils here with teflon coating."
Obviously you don't heat the carpet or couch up so how are they emitted?
"The compounds are volatile enough to get into the air, then they breakdown to the more resistant perfluroinated compounds."
Millions of us around the world have been using non-stick cookware blissfully ignorant for 70 years but its now emerging that Dupont may have known about these worrying health implications for the past 20 years, including birth defects in the babies of some Dupont factory workers. Now the US environmental protection agency is taking legal action against Dupont on this hidden knowledge but Dupon deny any wrong doing.
"We believe we are in the clear, were cooperating totally with the EPA, we've given them all the information, we don't believe there's a health effect from PFOA, human health effects." Leo Hide is Dupont's Australian research and development manager. He says only factory workers have reported flu-like symptoms due to higher exposure levels. "If you get above 350-400 the coating will start to decompose but the levels are so low that the probability of anyone getting fume fever from cookware to the best of our knowledge we haven't had a case in this country."
He says because Dupont doesn't make the cookware, only the teflon coating, they can't warn consumers on the products.
Why not put it on the teflon seal? "We put out a series of brochures which we send out tens of thousands every year, this is in Australia specifically, with warnings on those brochures" answers Leo.
But Dupont's critics aren't convinced, even the Federal US Dept of Justice has subpoenaed Dupont on more information on the health effects.
"This is a very large public health problem, you have a chemical that never breaks down, that's in everyones blood that causes many types of health effects that is the most serious problem, you're ever going to encounter with a chemical."
"I just think that people should be made aware, knowledge is your best bet, if you can arm yourself with knowledge then maybe you make different decisions" says Carli.