Episode 76: PFAS Are Everywhere — And 99% Go Undetected | Dr. Viktoria Müller

If you take a handful of dirt from the roadside, it contains PFAS. The challenge isn't finding forever chemicals — it's finding all of them. Standard monitoring methods cover 40 to 50 PFAS species. Thousands more go completely unmeasured. That's the gap Dr. Viktoria Müller has spent her career trying to close.Viktoria is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Graz specializing in PFAS environmental fate, transport, and the fluorine mass balance. Her work spans ski slopes, rivers, wastewater treatment plants, bees, wild deer, shrimp, and the Ganges River — and it has made international headlines. In this episode, she breaks down what we're missing, why routine analysis creates a false sense of security, and what wildlife can tell us that instruments alone cannot.In this episode:- [00:01:30] Why PFAS is unavoidable — and what you can actually control- [00:02:00] The pizza box explanation: how Viktoria describes PFAS to non-scientists- [00:04:00] How her research path built from soil → ski slopes → snowmelt → rivers → wildlife- [00:05:00] What "closing the fluorine mass balance gap" actually means for environmental monitoring- [00:06:50] Ski wax and the 99% problem: targeted PFAS analysis only identified less than 1% of the total organofluorine in ski wax — what is the rest?- [00:11:00] LC-MS/MS vs. ICP-MS/MS vs. CIC for PFAS and fluorine analysis — and which one Viktoria would buy ("don't blame me later")- [00:18:50] TOP assay vs. ozonation: same precursor, different breakdown products — what that means for anyone relying on TOP assay data- [00:21:00] Honeybees as short-term local PFAS sentinels — and how a beekeeper biologist changed how Viktoria interpreted her own data- [00:24:00] Collectors or house cleaners? How to tell whether an animal is accumulating PFAS or just carrying it on the surface- [00:25:30] The roe deer liver study: 87% drop in PFAS from 1998 to 2022 — bans work, but the industry keeps replacing regulated compounds with unregulated ones- [00:33:00] Wastewater treatment plants downstream: more PFAS species coming out than going in — and what the mass balance approach revealed about why- [00:37:00] Personal aside: Viktoria's one regret about not taking her own blood sample before she started working with PFAS- [00:39:30] What's next: a funded proposal exploring PFAS in clouds and atmospheric chemistry — a topic almost no one is working onConnect with Dr. Viktoria Müller:Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Prq41XUAAAAJ&hl=enLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viktoria-m%C3%BCller-8a1843a7/About Organomation:Organomation manufactures nitrogen blowdown evaporators and nitrogen generators used in PFAS sample preparation workflows, including EPA Methods 533, 537.1, and 1633. Learn more at organomation.com. @ChromatographyTalk  is proudly produced by  @Organomation  #PFAS #ForeverChemicals #AnalyticalChemistry #EnvironmentalChemistry #MassSpectrometry #Chromatography