...In 1802, a young French aristocrat named Irénée du Pont de Nemours, who had fled the French Revolution, built a gunpowder mill in northeast Delaware. By World War I, his venture, known as DuPont, had grown so large that it supplied half of the world’s gunpowder and was expanding into bombs and poison gas. But it was drawing fire on the home front. In 1934, Congress spent three days grilling DuPont executives about allegations that they had overbilled the military for explosives. The company became a national pariah almost overnight. To salvage both its reputation and its bottom line, it turned to a legendary adman named Bruce Barton. The only way DuPont could escape the “atmosphere of plague,” Barton advised, was to transform its image from that of a purveyor of doomsday weaponry to a maker of peacetime products that benefited American society. The following year, DuPont unveiled a new slogan: “Better Things for Better Living … Through Chemistry."
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In 1961, the Teflon-coated “Happy Pan” hit the market. During the Happy Pan rollout, DuPont’s chief toxicologist, Dorothy Hood, cautioned in a memo to executives that the substance should be "handled with extreme care.” She explained that a new study had found enlarged livers in rats and rabbits exposed to C8, which suggested the chemical was toxic. But DuPont continued to market Teflon and related products, which would burgeon into a billion-dollar-a-year business for the company.

Sue Bailey had just gotten pregnant with her third child when she was transferred to the Teflon division of Washington Works. There, she said, she channeled C8 waste into on-site pits using a contraption that looked like a bicycle pump. For the rest of her pregnancy, she suffered from crippling anxiety. “I knew in my gut that something was really wrong,” she says. When Bailey gave birth in January 1981, the baby had only half a nose and a ragged eyelid that gaped down to the middle of his cheek. 
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It was becoming clear that the implications of the lawsuits went far beyond the Tennants or the Kigers or the thousands of residents of the Ohio River Valley. By this time, C8 was being detected everywhere—produce and beef in American grocery stores, polar bears in the Arctic, children in the remote Faeroe Islands. One analysis of blood banks from around the world showed that nearly all of the blood contained C8. The lone exception was a set of archived samples that had been collected from Korean War veterans before 1952.
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http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-beautiful-parkersburg/