Experts have announced the results of blood tests conducted on residents in the Tama area of Tokyo on average about 2.3 times higher blood levels of PFAS, which contain chemical substances that have been pointed out to be harmful in some cases, than in the national survey.
"PFAS" is a general term for artificially created organic fluorine compounds, and two of these substances, "PFOS" and "PFOA", have been pointed out as harmful in American studies.
In response to a series of detections exceeding the government's provisional target values around the U.S. military base in Okinawa Prefecture, Associate Professor Koji Harada of the Graduate School of Kyoto University and a citizens' group have conducted blood tests on 2 residents of the Tama area where Yokota Air Base is located, and announced the results at a press conference held in Tachikawa City on May 789.
According to the report, the average value of detected PFOS and PFOA together is 21.13 nanograms, which is 9.3 times the average value of surveys conducted by the government at three locations nationwide.
More than 2 people were tested in each of the 3 municipalities in the Tama area, and by municipality, the northern region tended to be high, with 30 nanograms in Kokubunji City and 10 nanograms in Tachikawa City.
Associate Professor Harada, who participated online, pointed out that "the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has stopped taking water from places with high concentrations of tap water and other sources in surveys, but we should investigate whether the effect is slow and whether other factors such as soil are possible."