Currently, PFAS pollution is an issue that is lacking in two elements that are critical to its solution: legal regulation and public awareness. The lack of both of these has allowed chemical manufacturing companies to pollute our water sources without restriction, harming the health of hundreds of thousands of people.
When it comes to legal regulation of PFAS, the EPA has been incredibly lax in setting regulations for chemicals that have been obviously shown to cause negative health effects since the year 2000. This may be in part due to lobbying on behalf of large chemical companies, but another large part is the wide variety of PFASs. There are thousands of potential PFASs that chemical companies can use in manufacturing, and whenever one particular chemical catches too much heat, they can easily switch to other PFAS alternatives that they claim are safe, but in reality highly likely cause the same health effects.
With so much of scientific work concentrated on the two most major (and phased out) PFASs, PFOA and PFOS, more work needs to be done on the relationship between the chemical structure of PFAS and the human body, so that manufacturers cannot keep swapping chemicals to avoid regulations.
Another major part that is lacking is public awareness. The public, to a large extent, do not know about this threat to their health lurking in their water supplies. A lack of regulations on this matter further downplays the threat that this poses, because there is this misconception that if there are no regulations on this, then it is not urgent. Additionally, public awareness drives legal change, so it is a vicious cycle where public awareness of an urgent issue is low because politicians have not introduced legislation to deal with the issue.