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Most of us probably take our tap water for granted, but recent events remind us that we shouldn’t. Salmonella contamination of the water supply in Alamosa, Colorado sickened over 300 people and left residents avoiding showers and drinking bottled water for a week. Abel Pharmboy explains that the city was one of the few that didn’t have a water chlorination program – but that’s changed now, and the episode reminds us that trace amounts of chlorinated acid byproducts in the water seem less alarming when compared to potentially fatal bacterial illness.
Meanwhile, in Iowa, manure and commercial fertilizers spread on frozen ground contributed to record-high levels of ammonia in the water. Des Moines’s utility had to draw on alternate water sources to keep taps running in the metro area, and use four times the usual amount of chlorine. As alarming as such instances of contamination are, though, water supply and infrastructure should probably be more of a concern.
By Vera Toulokhonova
Over spring break, my family and I traveled to spend a weekend in New York City. One of our expeditions included a visit to the Statue of Liberty and, naturally, to the large restroom located on Ellis Island. The first thing I noticed about this notably modern facility is the proliferation of green signs all over its walls. Each had a large, bold, green heading, which read “Green Restroom.” I was curious to see exactly what constitutes a restroom that prides itself on being “Green.”
My experiences tell me that journalists play a critical role in public health improvements; my evidence is anecdotal, but my examples continue to mount. Take Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette and his coverage of the toxic substance ammonium perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C8. It’s the chemical used to make Teflon non-stick surfaces. Recently, Ward wrote about a mortality analysis of workers in a 3M facility in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. What’s noteworthy about Ward’s story is not so much the study’s findings, but rather, that he does the yeoman’s work to monitor the EPA’s TSCA 8(e) docket. What do you know—something interesting was submitted by 3M in late February 2008: “Mortality of Employees of an Ammonium Perfluorooctanoate Production Facility.”
The Associated Press conducted a five-month investigation and found that drug residues have been detected in the drinking water of 24 major U.S. metropolitan areas, which serve roughly 41 million Americans. Concerns about these drug residues have largely focused on wildlife, as estrogen from birth control pills and other hormonal drugs has been interfering with fish reproduction (see past post here). Now, though, the AP is highlighting the number of people exposed and the potential for human health effects:
Most of us are lucky enough not to have to worry about our sewage. We flush the toilet, it goes away somewhere, and we don’t have to worry about cholera or other diseases that spread when waste contaminates the water supply.
While most of sewage systems do a great job of making the water look clean and getting rid of bacteria and viruses, they often aren’t designed to remove synthetic chemicals. With so many of us dependent on daily doses of pharmaceuticals, we’re excreting lots of drugs (or their metabolites), and they’re sticking around in treated wastewater. Researchers are now starting to discover what that means for the environment.
The journal Epidemiology has just published new evidence that drinking hexavalent chromium — also called chromium 6 — increases risk of stomach cancer. The study is important for public health purposes, since many drinking water sources are chromium contaminated (including the water in the community in the movie Erin Brockovich).
This new study is also the latest piece of a very ugly scandal that illustrates how polluters manufacture doubt to impede regulation. And this scandal is but one of several in which chromium polluters have manipulated epidemiologic studies to sow uncertainty - see our case study on chromium 6 at DefendingScience.org.
Pump Handle readers may recall our reporting on the controversy around a study of stomach cancer in Chinese villages where there were high levels of chromium in the drinking water. After an initial study reported elevated rates of stomach cancer, product defense consultants working for US chromium polluters reanalyzed the study, and the increased risk disappeared. The consultants re-analyzed the data and arranged for it to be published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM) without their names on it, hiding any connection to the product defense firm (Chemrisk) or the polluters who paid for the re-analysis. After the controversy was reported in the Wall Street Journal, the editor of JOEM retracted the study.
The Council of Science Editors has organized 235 journals from 37 countries are publishing more than 750 articles on poverty and human development this week. For its theme issue, PLoS Medicine asked a variety of commentators from around the world to name the single intervention that they think would improve the health of those living on less than $1 per day. While reading the article, I was struck by three themes that emerged in multiple responses:
The Chesapeake Watershed in the eastern U.S. covers over 500 miles, reaching north to Otsego Lake, NY and south to Virginia Beach, and traveling west to Blacksburg, VA and east to Ocean City, MD. It’s been called a ”giant, sprawling system of rivers that all drain into one shallow tidal basin—the Chesapeake Bay and its tidal tributaries.” (map). It’s home to more than 3,600 species of plants and animals, with over 15 million people residing in it.
A major river in the Chesapeake Watershed is the Anacostia River which extends from Montgomery County, MD through Washington, DC, flowing directly into the Potomac River (photo). This week we learned that raw sewage has been “leaking” into the Anacostia River and is now polluting the watershed.
Occupational exposure to manganese has been in the news lately, with law suits by welders who claim neurological disease caused by manganese exposure. Now two scientists at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute have written a paper in which they argue that current guidelines for safe levels of manganese in drinking water are based on a misinterpretation of a twenty-five year old study, and that newer evidence suggests that at least for infants and other vulnerable populations, the current guideline values are not adequately protective.
In a paper available online at Environmental Health Perspectives, Karin Ljung and Marie Vahter trace back the foundation for the World Health Organization’s (and the EPA’s) recommendation for manganese in drinking water to a single study from 1982 that was misinterpreted in calculating a No Observed Adverse Effect Level. That mistake, combined with several new studies showing neurological effects in children, lead the authors to conclude that it’s time to re-evaluate the guideline data.
Last week, the U.S. EPA issued a new regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to help reduce the amount of lead contained in consumers’ tap water. The new rule amends a 1991 EPA’s “Lead and Copper Rule” by requiring improved monitoring and replacement of lead-service lines, and providing more complete information to consumers (by water utilities) so they receive more timely and useful information about lead contamination in their drinking water.
By Liz Borkowski
Aman at Technology, Health & Development reminds us that it’s World Water Week, and provides a great collection of water-related links for the occasion. Several of the articles are about a backlash against bottled water – apparently, a critical mass of people has just discovered that a) tap water is often as clean, if not cleaner, than bottled water and b) that buying bottled water is wasteful.
Now that we’re all quenching our thirst with tap water again, this might be a good time to look at a few concerns that have been arising about municipal water supplies.
By David Michaels
Many people first heard about hexavalent chromium, or chromium 6, from the movie Erin Brockovich, which is based on the true story of a lawsuit over chromium-contaminated groundwater in the town of Hinkley, California.
Less well-known is the campaign waged by companies that manufacture or use chromium 6 to convince regulatory agencies that the chemical, which has recognized as a lung carcinogen for more than 50 years, just isn’t so dangerous. There’s a lot of chromium-contaminated water out there, and if chromium 6 in drinking water were acknowledged to be a cause of cancer, it would cost industry a lot of money in clean-up costs.
It won’t surprise regular readers of this blog – or anyone who’s seen our case study on industry efforts to delay OSHA’s chromium 6 standard – to hear that these companies have turned to product defense firms, and that the firms have produced studies that differ markedly from those completed by non-industry-funded scientists. Read the rest of this entry »
Today is World Water Day, and this year’s theme is “Coping with Water Scarcity.” In its WWD report (PDF), UN-Water (the official United Nations mechanism for follow-up of the Millennium Development Goals), warns that water scarcity will increase in the coming decades, driven by four main factors:
By Dick Clapp
This week, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection issued preliminary health-based guidance to local water companies on levels of perflurooctanoic acid (PFOA) in drinking water (PDF). Based on current knowledge of cancer and non-cancer effects of this chemical, they recommended a limit of 0.04 parts per billion, and they say this will be re-evaluated as additional data becomes available. This is the latest in what will be an on-going process of research and regulation of this ubiquitous and persistent bioaccumulative toxin. The saga that has been unfolding is summarized in a PFOA case study on the SKAPP website, and a series of health studies are underway in Parkersburg, West Virginia, that will be reported over the next two years.
By David Michaels
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal published last December (by Peter Waldman, 12/23/05), product defense experts at ChemRisk pulled off a particularly audacious scam on behalf of Pacific Gas and Electric, the California utility that was being sued for contaminating drinking water with hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen.
ChemRisk’s scientists went to China to obtain the raw data of a 1987 study that had implicated chromium-polluted water in high cancer rates, paying the lead author $2,000, re-analyzing his data, changing the results to exonerate chromium and republishing the study still under his name in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM), without obtaining his permission and without acknowledging that ChemRisk had done virtually all the work on the new study.
Following the exposé, the editor of JOEM retracted the paper (July 2006 issue).
Now the story has resurfaced, with the paper’s second author claiming (according to her attorney) that the Wall Street Journal’s coverage was “false and defamatory,” and demanding a retraction and apology. She is also demanding that JOEM withdraw their retraction, and re-publish the original article.
Neither the WSJ or JOEM are backing down. Here are the details:
by Liz Borkowski
After posting about the global water and sanitation crisis, I learned via Gristmill that rap star and Def Jams president Jay-Z has aligned himself with this important cause. On a recent world tour, the star visited Angola and South Africa and witnessed firsthand what life is like for the more than one billion people who lack access to clean drinking water. MTV will air a 30-minute documentary about Jay-Z’s trip on Friday (a two-minute “Diary of Jay-Z in Africa” clip is available on MTV’s site).
by Liz Borkowski
Nearly half of Mumbai’s 18 million residents live in unofficial settlements called zopadpatti. In one of these areas, Dharavi, estimates suggest there is one toilet for every 1,4440 people, tap water flows for only two hours each day, and approximately 15 families share each water tap.
Around the globe, rural residents are migrating to urban areas and expanding these unofficial settlements, where global challenges in water and sanitation are highly visible. Many rural areas that struggled with water to begin with face new constraints as aquifers are depleted and global warming shrinks once-reliable water sources.
The 2015 Millennium Development Goals deadline is approaching quickly, and we’re unlikely to meet the MDG targets if we don’t address the crisis in water and sanitation. That’s according to a new report from the UNDP, which warns that one in five people living in the developing world lacks access to clean water and that 2.6 billion people – nearly half of the total developing-country population – lack access to adequate sanitation. Read the rest of this entry »
