Overheating a Teflon pan is pretty difficult to do, and even then it's not like it suddenly exposes your body to dangerous chemicals if you continue to use the pan after it's been overheated once.
It's not that difficult to heat the pan to 280 degrees by accident, which is all that's required, no? At that point you feel sick and your pet birds start to drop dead.
Note I said "after". And you'd have to leave it at 280 degrees for quite some time to get the temporary effects. Some good ventilation and taking the pan off the fire will end the effects.
If I'm remembering the statistics correctly, despite the millions of Teflon pans in the US, there is less than 1 case of people getting Teflon flu from cookware per year. It's just not something that happens. Lightning strikes humans more often.
The probability of me leaving pan on high heat by accident: high, done this multiple times. The probability of me reporting any sickness as teflon flu: zero because I had no idea that Teflon could cause anything like this until yesterday when I looked this up.
And we don't know anything about long-term effects.
Anyway it's pointless because no matter how safe teflon is the side products of its manufacturing should already be enough of concern to render it illegal but somehow no one cares
