PFOA stands for perfluorooctanoic acid - a synthetic acid in the PFAS family with an 8-carbon backbone where every hydrogen atom has been replaced by fluorine. That structural simplicity made it extraordinarily useful for industrial manufacturing. For decades, it was the compound that made PTFE (Teflon) possible - a processing aid that helped the slippery polymer bond to metal surfaces during cookware production.
It was also, as we now know, a confirmed human carcinogen that DuPont kept internal evidence on for decades while millions of people were unknowingly exposed through their cookware, their drinking water, and the air around manufacturing plants in West Virginia and the Ohio River Valley.
The PFOA story is arguably the most documented industrial toxic exposure case in US history. The lawsuits brought by attorney Rob Bilott against DuPont beginning in 1999 - later dramatized in the 2019 film Dark Waters - led to the largest community health study ever conducted on a single chemical: the C8 Health Project, which enrolled more than 69,000 people living near the Parkersburg, WV plant and tracked their health outcomes for years. That data formed the scientific foundation for most of what we now know about PFOA's health effects.
What PFOA Actually Is
Chemically, PFOA belongs to the perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acid (PFCA) subclass of PFAS. The 8 in its name refers to its 8-carbon chain - which is why it was historically called the "C8" chemical in industry documents. Its full IUPAC name is 2,2,3,3,4,4,5,5,6,6,7,7,8,8,8-pentadecafluorooctanoic acid, and its CAS registry number is 335-67-1.
PFOA is a mobile, water-soluble PFAS acid - very different in behavior from PTFE, the stable polymer it helped manufacture. Where PTFE is a high-molecular-weight solid that doesn't dissolve or absorb into tissue, PFOA is a small-molecule acid that moves through water, crosses the placental barrier, accumulates in blood and organs, and has a half-life of roughly 3.5 years in the human body.
That half-life figure deserves unpacking: it means that 3.5 years after your last significant PFOA exposure, half of what you absorbed is still circulating in your blood. And because daily small exposures constantly top up what you have, blood PFOA never naturally reaches zero without radical exposure reduction.
The DuPont C8 History
DuPont began manufacturing PFOA commercially in the early 1950s, licensing the electrochemical fluorination process from 3M. By the late 1950s, PFOA (which DuPont internally called "C8") was being used as a processing aid in Teflon production at their Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
DuPont's internal research documented health problems starting in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, they had internal data showing PFOA caused testicular tumors in rats, accumulated in the blood of workers at their plant, and was present in the blood of people living near the facility. In 1981, DuPont found PFOA in the blood of children born to female workers at the plant - and quietly moved pregnant women off the production line while continuing operations and never disclosing the findings publicly.
The contamination reached the broader public through the plant's industrial waste disposal practices. PFOA was deposited in landfills that leached into the Ohio River tributary supplying drinking water to communities in both West Virginia and Ohio. By the time Rob Bilott filed his first lawsuit in 1999 on behalf of a local farmer, PFOA was detected in 99% of the blood samples from residents in the affected areas at concentrations far above the national average.
The 2004 settlement created the C8 Health Project and its independent Science Panel. In 2012, that panel issued its definitive findings: PFOA exposure was linked to six diseases - kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, high cholesterol (hypercholesterolemia), and preeclampsia. DuPont eventually paid more than $671 million in settlements to approximately 3,500 plaintiffs with cancer and other PFOA-related diagnoses.
Health Effects