October the 3rd, 2026 – Croatian subjects found to have so-called forever chemicals in them have spoken out, with one man from Lika having been found with the highest levels of all.
Gospić lawyer Vjekoslav Bušić, better known to the public as one of the founders and prominent representatives of the Citizens’ Initiative “Gospić is Our Home”, revealed in a report by Slobodan Mufic for Index that he has the worst findings among the ten Croatian participants in the study on the presence of PFAS compounds in the blood, also known as “forever chemicals”.
“I spoke with the other participants in the study and it turned out that the highest values of the four long-chain PFAS were found in me, even though I’ve only been living in Gospić for the last three and a half years. Interestingly, my wife is clean as a whistle. Her findings are phenomenally low, and we have practically the same lifestyle habits and eat the same food,” said Bušić.
7 from gospić, one from pula and two from knin
The study was commissioned by the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament. The biological analyses were carried out by the Institute for Occupational Medicine of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, and the toxicological interpretation of the results was done by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In addition to the seven people from Gospić, two more from Knin and one person from Pula were tested.
A total of 110 people from Croatia, Italy, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, Denmark and Finland took part. Among the participants were also women of reproductive age, residents of areas near the chemical industry and trade union representatives, which shows that this is not a randomly selected representative sample of the European population.
All four analysed long-chain PFAS compounds (PFOA, PFNA, PFHxS and PFOS) were found in all 110 participants. However, in 27 of them, or 25 percent, the sum was above the health-based reference value set by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Of the ten Croatian participants included in the study, six had a sum above the reference value – that is, 60 percent. The sum of the four long-chain PFAS compounds in the study was compared with the reference concentration of 6.9 nanograms per millilitre of blood. Exceeding that value does not mean that a person will develop a disease, nor does it constitute a diagnosis. It is a health-based reference value linked to EFSA’s assessment of long-term exposure to PFAS compounds and possible effects on the immune system.
Bušić emphasises that he has no reliable explanation for his findings: “It’s difficult for me to assess what the cause could be; I can only speculate. I thought it might be because in the last year and a half I have really often walked around the silos in the former PPK Velebit. Maybe the problem is inhaling those particles – I don’t know myself.”
how dangerous are these forever chemicals?
“On the other hand, toxicologists warn that heavy metals, which were also found in the illegally disposed hazardous waste in Gospić, are in the long term much more toxic and dangerous to human health than those ‘forever chemicals’. In any case, the findings are what they are, but one should not draw some final and alarming conclusions about carcinogenicity from them. It seems to me that all of this is still quite unresearched,” says Bušić, and adds:
“I still believe that I live in one of the cleanest and best-preserved areas in all of Europe. It’s important that it remains so and that the remediation of the waste in Gospić is carried out in the best possible way. And who knows, maybe I ‘picked up’ the PFAS while I was living in Zagreb.” The testing was carried out in the first days of July this year in Brussels. Bušić says that the people from Gospić received a link where they could apply online: “We didn’t even know how many people were participating in the study; in the end we realised that there were ten of us from Croatia. Apart from the seven of us from Gospić, the application of one person from Pula and two people from Knin, also members of an association, was accepted.”
The office of Croatian MEP from the Greens/EFA, Gordan Bosanac, organised the participation of ten Croatian volunteers and their trip to Belgium for blood sampling. In June, Bosanac described the project as a study of people deliberately selected from areas with possible increased exposure to PFAS, for example near landfills or industrial plants.
“Given our situation, this was a good signal that we should perhaps carry out some biomonitoring on a wider circle of people. Especially on those who live relatively close to the silos in Gospić or those who worked at the Rakitovac municipal landfill, where that hazardous waste was also brought. And it would be interesting to see the findings of the people who worked for Josip Šincek, who transported and unloaded that waste,” said Bušić.
Josip Šincek is a Varaždin entrepreneur and the main suspect in the USKOK investigation into illegal waste management; investigators suspect that through related companies he organised the import and transport of plastic, mixed and medical waste from Croatia and abroad. In Gospić, his company operated from 2021 in the former PPK Velebit complex in Bilajska Street, where tens of thousands of tonnes of illegally disposed and partly hazardous waste were later discovered.
