I worked at 3M and it was well known in the 80's that people had low concentrations of the things in their bodies. There was just no data to indicate they were toxic in the concentrations people had in their system. In fact for a long time it was difficult to detect and the guy who worked down the hall from me developed methods to pick it up back then. I know they are toxic for people who have high exposure to the compounds like people that drink well water near the manufacturing plants but for the general public it isn't there. They should definitely do everything they can to replace the compounds with other material, especially in the food packaging applications they use it for and I know they dropped one of the compounds which was more toxic in the 90's but they are important compounds to people in the fire fighting business and I think still for fabric treatments.

@ Lamplighter
I am pretty sure they did animal studies on the materials when they first came out with them and the conclusion was drawn from the result. I do know in the late 90's they did an animal study on the PFOA's versus a similar compound PFBA and found the PFOA's to be more toxic than the PFBA's and they decided to stop manufacturing the PFOA's It could be why they were more sensitive about releasing data on the PFOA's. They could have handled it better but in the long run I think you are going to find this is treated like the PCB problem with GE. Almost no one is being exposed to toxic levels of this stuff and so once it drops out of the news cycle for a while not much is going to be done.

No links on the study. They are company documents. I am assuming they did because the results for the animal studies were reported extensively in the 90's and the chemicals were (are?) used in food contact applications so the FDA would require it. But the premise for the EPA spending 12 billion to clean these up is they "may" be harmful. They have no evidence that they are toxic in the levels they are found in our water. I wish they or 3M would do a study to definitivly determine they are or are not harmful to humans in levels commonly seen in peoples water.