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This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemitabasu. Today, how forever chemicals have poisoned the world.

For most of his life, Michael Hickey never saw himself as an activist.

He's an insurance underwriter.

He has a fear of public speaking.

That's investigative journalist Mariah Blake.

He had no interest in environmental issues.

He had no interest in politics. He liked to joke that he got his news from ESPN.

Then in 2010, his father was diagnosed with an aggressive kidney cancer and died a few years later at the age of 70.

Michael was devastated, and he started to think about how this could have happened,

and about some of the other deaths in their small town of

Hoosick Falls, New York.

Everyone in the community had stories of people who had died young of cancer, and there

seemed to be extraordinarily high rates of rare cancers and aggressive cancers.

Michael began to suspect that these deaths had something to do with the local Teflon factory,

where his father had worked for many years.

So I typed Teflon and cancer into Google,

and he called up this large health study that had taken place in West Virginia,

and it showed that this particular chemical

called PFOA as a type of forever chemical had been linked to kidney cancer.

...