(May 27-30, 2018, The Faroe Islands) STEEP researcher, Dr. Philippe Grandjean, serves as co-chair of international conference focused on the impacts of toxic chemicals – including PFAS – on prenatal health. The conference be held on the Faroe Islands, a STEEP community research site. Learn more about the conference. Dr. Philippe Grandjean of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health discussed the delays of about 20 years before crucial information on PFAS became publicly known. PFAS had been found in umbilical cord blood from a female PFAS production worker in 1981. The information was kept secret, and only in 2004 did researchers find that PFAS pass the placenta so that the mother’s PFAS burden is shared with the fetus. Likewise, toxicity to the immune system had already been shown in a monkey study in 1978, but only rediscovered after 2000.