In 1961, DuPont’s internal laboratories confirmed that Teflon coating caused liver damage in rats at low doses. The company did not publish the findings. Over the six following decades, while households around the world cooked in non-stick pans, DuPont and 3M accumulated studies linking their compounds to cancer, congenital malformations and endocrine damage, and classified them as confidential. Today, those same compounds — PFAS, or “forever chemicals” — circulate freely in the popular kitchens of Colombia and the rest of Latin America, without regulation, without mandatory labelling and without any planned exit framework. The bodies of children who eat in those kitchens accumulate substances that do not degrade, that no local health system measures, and that the manufacturing industry knew to be toxic before their parents were born.
The scratched pan is not a domestic oversight. It is the visible end of a chain that begins with the best-documented corporate fraud in contemporary chemical industry, crosses the regulatory asymmetry between the global North and Latin America, and ends in the bodies of families without information, without alternatives and without any institution to protect them. What follows is not a precautionary warning. It is an inventory of harm.
The Founding Crime
In 1961, DuPont’s head of toxicology concluded, in internal experiments, that Teflon materials caused hepatic enlargement in rats at low doses and recommended strictly avoiding skin contact. The report was classified as confidential. No regulator was informed. The non-stick pan continued to be sold as a harmless domestic advance.
Over the following two decades, the internal archives of DuPont and 3M record a methodical accumulation of suppressed evidence. In 1970, researchers at the Haskell laboratory, funded by DuPont, found that PFOA was highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested. In 1979, dogs exposed to a single dose died two days later. In 1980, both companies identified congenital malformations in the babies of female workers exposed to PFOA, did not inform their employees, and the following year DuPont circulated a memorandum claiming to hold no evidence of malformations. The memo existed to internally refute what the company already knew externally.
In 2023, researchers at the University of California San Francisco analysed 39 internal documents from DuPont and 3M obtained in the 1999 legal proceedings. The result admitted no alternative readings: both companies had reproduced the tobacco industry model, suppressing internal knowledge of the toxicity of their products for decades while publicly constructing the narrative of their safety.
“These documents reveal clear evidence that the chemical industry knew about the dangers of PFAS and did not communicate them to the public, to regulators, or even to their own employees.”
— Tracey Woodruff, Director of the Programme on Reproductive Health and the Environment, University of California San Francisco, Annals of Global Health, May 2023.
In 2004, the United States Environmental Protection Agency fined DuPont for concealing its own findings. The fine was 16.45 million dollars; DuPont’s annual revenues from PFOA and its derivatives exceeded one billion dollars that year. That proportion is not an anomaly. It is the going rate.
In 2017, DuPont paid 671 million dollars to settle around 3,500 claims for damages linked to PFOA. A 2025 study estimates that PFAS in drinking water and cookware in the United States could cause up to 6,864 additional cancer cases per year, with established correlations for kidney, testicular and endocrine system tumours. DuPont knew of its compounds’ toxicity 21 years before that information reached the public domain.
The Anatomy of Everyday Contamination
Teflon is the trade name for polytetrafluoroethylene, known as PTFE, a fluorinated polymer belonging to the PFAS family. In its intact film state and at controlled temperatures, chemical migration towards food can be considered limited. The problem begins when the surface is scratched, and multiplies when that surface is heated above 260 degrees centigrade — a temperature frequently reached in any Colombian kitchen when frying in hot oil or when an empty pan is left on a lit burner.
Above that thermal threshold, PTFE begins to decompose. The compounds released include PFOA and PFOS, the most documented in the PFAS family, along with other related substances whose toxicology remains unknown because no one has funded the necessary studies. A 2023 Ecology Center analysis examining 24 pans manufactured predominantly in Asia found that 79% of non-stick pans were coated with PTFE, including models labelled “PFOA-free” that had simply replaced that compound with other PFAS variants whose long-term toxicity has not been determined. The industry learnt to shift the nominal threshold of concern without displacing the mechanism of harm.
The scratched pan is, in exposure terms, the worst possible combination. Particles of degraded coating incorporate directly into food during cooking. Vapours generated by overheating are inhaled in small, poorly ventilated kitchens. Exposure is both digestive and respiratory, and it is chronic, because the same pan is used for years. A 2017 PubMed study concludes that pyrolytic gases from PTFE present moderate to severe toxicity even at normal cooking temperatures, and that the substitute compounds the industry offers as replacements for PFOA are not backed by any solid science; they are the same safety promise, reformulated.
Latin America as Unprotected Territory
The question of PFAS regulation in Latin America has an answer that admits no nuance. PFAS are largely unregulated in the region. Some countries partially follow the restrictions of the Stockholm Convention (the main international treaty on persistent chemical pollutants, in force since 2004), which covers PFOS and PFOA specifically. But that Convention does not extend to the thousands of PFAS variants the industry has developed as substitutes since PFOA began to be restricted in Northern markets. What is progressively prohibited in Europe or in several North American states arrives unobstructed in Colombian homes.
This regulatory void is not a bureaucratic delay. It is the structural condition that allows products that can no longer be sold in regulated markets to find an outlet where regulation does not exist. There is no Colombian framework compelling cookware manufacturers to declare fluorinated compounds in their coatings. There is no PFAS migration limit towards food in national health legislation. There is no alert system to detect chronic exposure in the population. There are no data. No figures. No policy. There is the market.
The scratched pan circulating in the Colombian market, manufactured predominantly in China or South-East Asia, carries no warning and is not required to. The intermediaries who sell it in markets and neighbourhood shops have access to no information sheet mentioning PFAS. The consumer has no instrument with which to know what they are buying. What exists in its place is the price. A cheap Teflon pan costs less than a cast-iron or stainless-steel one, and in a country where purchasing power does not permit decisions based on toxicological information that nobody has disseminated, price always decides.
A 2025 study estimates that PFAS in drinking water and cookware in the United States could generate up to 6,864 additional cancer cases per year. The European Chemicals Agency calculates that at the current rate, 4.4 million metric tonnes of PFAS will be released into the environment over the next three decades. In Latin America, no biomonitoring system exists that would allow calculation of the PFAS body burden in the general population.
What a Child’s Body Accumulates
PFAS are bioaccumulative. They do not degrade in the body, and each exposure is added to the previous one without decreasing. In adults, accumulation produces, according to decades of studies on highly exposed populations, thyroid dysfunction, progressive liver damage, reduced immune response, pregnancy complications and increased risk of kidney and testicular cancers. In children, the mechanism is structurally more serious, because the endocrine system that PFAS disrupt is the very one that regulates development — and that development is ongoing. This is not a future harm. It is a harm occurring while the child grows.
The evidence links childhood PFAS exposure to thyroid function alterations affecting cognitive development, to documented reductions in vaccine response, to disruptions in puberty, to low birth weight in children of exposed mothers and to metabolic disorders that manifest decades later. The child who eats every day from a scratched pan experiences no visible symptoms attributable to that cause. The accumulation is silent. The pathology, deferred. The diagnosis, if it comes, arrives without causal context, because no doctor in Colombia is in a position to connect an altered hormonal profile to the household cookware.
This invisibility is not neutral. The industry that suppressed evidence for decades knew that deferred, diffuse harm is the hardest to litigate. There is no precise moment of exposure. No immediate symptom. No legible causal chain for the health system of a country without biomonitoring capacity. What remains is the chemical accumulation in the body of a child whose food is cooked every day in a pan that should have been discarded three years ago, in a kitchen where no one has told his mother that this is a risk, because no institution has said so yet.
Conclusion
What this text describes is not a hypothetical risk. It is an ongoing harm, sustained by decades of documented corporate fraud, by a regulatory asymmetry that redistributes that harm towards the least protected households and by an institutional silence in Colombia that is not passive but functional. The chemical industry knew since 1961 what its products did. Northern regulators took forty years to act. Colombian authorities have not acted yet.
The scratched pan does not wait. It is on the stove right now, in tens of thousands of popular kitchens in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali and Barranquilla, in the municipalities of the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, in rural kitchens where the informal market is the only offering and no institution arrives with warnings — heating oil to temperatures that degrade the coating and release compounds that settle in the liver, thyroid and reproductive system of the children who eat at that table. There is no Colombian authority to tell those families they should discard it. There is no substitution programme. No monitoring system. There is the market, which keeps selling cheap Teflon pans because no one prevents it, and there is the science, which has known for decades what that means and which, in Colombia, no one in power has yet decided to listen to…
G.S.
Sources
- “The Devil They Knew: Chemical Documents Analysis of Industry Influence on PFAS Science”, Annals of Global Health / PMC, May 2023
- “DuPont, 3M Concealed Evidence of PFAS Risks”, Union of Concerned Scientists, 2019
- “Undisclosed PFAS Coatings Common on Cookware”, Ecology Center, 2023
- “PFAS: A Global Perspective — Latin America”, Norton Rose Fulbright, 2022
- “For Decades, Polluters Knew PFAS Chemicals Were Dangerous but Hid Risks from Public”, Environmental Working Group, 2019
- “Non Stick Cookware and Cancer: Risks and Safer Alternatives”, Everhope.care, 2025
- “UNC Study Finds Cookware, Food Processing Contributes to PFAS Exposure”, NC Health News, October 2025
- “Legacy and Emerging Pollutants in Latin America”, ScienceDirect, August 2022
- “PTFE-Coated Non-Stick Cookware and Toxicity Concerns: A Perspective”, PubMed, 2017
- “A Legal History of PFAS”, Water Finance & Management, 2023
- “Makers of PFAS ‘Forever Chemicals’ Covered up the Dangers”, UC San Francisco, May 2023
- “PFAS Regulation Around the World”, Antea Group, 2023
Actualizado el 19 de April de 2026
