Meeting Abstract
This project’s primary objective was to characterize any adverse impacts of PFAA to birds, with growth, development, and survival as the primary endpoints. PFAAs are a class of persistent, anthropogenic pollutants used in a wide variety of products for their non-reactivity, including in aqueous firefighting foam (AFFF). Secondary endpoints included examining how much accumulation of the target chemical occurs in liver tissue and how the body burden of PFOA and PFHpA, the two target PFAAs of this study, are altered by egg deposition. Furthermore, this project attempted to assess how much of the target chemical was present in egg yolk and how much juvenile quail retain after one month of growth. Chronic toxicity of the two target compounds was tested using Northern Bobwhite as the model species. Adult birds were exposed to drinking water containing 20 ng/mL, 1 ng/mL, and 0.1 ng/mL of the target chemical over the course of study (90 days). Residue analysis was conducted on adult and juvenile liver tissue as well as on eggs. Neither PFHpA or PFOA reduced hatching success, reproduction, or adult or juvenile Northern bobwhite survival at 1.860 or 1.745 µg/kg/day, respectively. However, it did appear that chronic ingestion of PFOA (1.745 µg PFOA/kg/day) may significantly increase the weight of hatchling birds after one week, an effect observed in other vertebrates. Furthermore, residue analysis confirmed that female birds do reduce their body burden of both PFOA and PFHpA through deposition to eggs.
