Fire retardant itself is much more harmful than heavy metals in this context.

It essentially causes neurodegenerative diseases, especially if you inhale it.

This applies to unintuitive routes of exposure, like taking a hot shower on an Air Force base that used flame retardant in fire drills decades prior and breathing in the water suspended in air.

> Fire retardant itself is much more harmful than heavy metals in this context.

I haven't found any studies about that, can you link them? It doesn't look like ammonium phosphate is dangerous.

It's ammonia phosphates with trace amounts of heavy metals.

Great investigative reporting!

So the article contains the data for the detected concentration. And it's basically a nothingburger.

For example, the samples contained 37 to 80 micrograms per liter of cadmium. The safety limit for _drinking_ _water_ is 5 micrograms. So diluting the retardant with 10 times the water makes it safe enough to drink.

Lead content in the samples was wildly different, from 7 micrograms to 800, indicating that the sampling procedure itself was unreliable.

Similar story for chromium, 100 micrograms is the safe level, and 200-300 micrograms were in the tested samples.

In fact, only arsenic is concerning, with roughly 10-60 times the allowed concentration for the drinking water.

All the heavy metals were below 1ppm, are any of the levels concerning?

In case there's some natural accumulation process, the concentration can reach any levels, so absolute quantity might (or might not) matter as well.

Breathing? That's not listed as a benefit in your job description!

Makes me think of the 9/11 first responders, and Jon Stewart fighting politicians who want to cut off their benefits...