Residents in Flint, MI said over and over that the filters were not reliable to keep lead out of their tap water. EPA the state and some scientists said that activists were just creating a crisis that didn’t exist. Well, now we see the same thing in NJ. Read about the problem.
Tag: water
Some Pittsboro, North Carolina residents have been suspicious of their water since testing in 2017 showed that there were elevated levels of PFAs in Cape Fear River, their main water source. The toxins come from the Chemours Fayetteville Works chemical plant, located upriver of Pittsboro.
According to Pittsboro’s mayor, very few residents are aware that their water may be contaminated with PFAS. While the levels found weren’t technically above the legal limits, research suggests that there isn’t a safe level of PFAS contamination in water because the chemical remains in people’s systems for extended periods of time.
Duke University will be conducting a study on the impacts of PFAS in the bloodstream on human health, and will take blood samples of atleast 30 Pittsboro residents in the coming year. <Read more>
Currently, the action standard for lead for New York schools is 15 ppb— but research from the NRDC suggests that this is too high, as no level of lead intake is safe for children. They propose lowering New York’s lead action standard in schools to 1 ppb, in order to protect children from the affects of lead poisoning. <Read more>
Last Monday, Keurig Dr. Pepper announced they would be pulling their bottled water brand Peñafiel from the shelves, as a report found the arsenic levels in their water to be non compliant with FDA bottled water standards.
One of the reports in question, by the Center for Environmental Health (CEH), found both Peñafiel and Starkey bottled water to contain high levels of arsenic. Peñafiel is sold at Target and Walmart, and Starkey is sold at Whole Foods.
Arsenic in water bottles may be more common of a problem than we think: a study conducted last April found 11/130 bottled water brands sold have detectable levels of arsenic. <Read more>
Members of the Seneca Nation paddled down the entire 290 miles of the Allegheny River, called Ohi:yo’ (meaning beautiful river) in the Seneca language, in a journey called Paddle for Peace to Protect Our Waters. The journey has been organized by Seneca cause Defend Ohi:yo’, a group that helped stop corporations from dumping treated fracking water in the river just last year. The purpose of the journey is to raise awareness about the importance of protecting the environment and to protest a proposed pipeline project that will threaten the region’s rivers. <Read more>
- One of many bends down the 290 mile length of Ohi:yo’ (Allegheny) River
This is the question that journalist Jim Daley raised recently in an article published in Scientific American. According to the article, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is substantially changing the program that evaluates the toxicity of chemicals by shifting staff and program emphasis from the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) to duties related to implementation of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Daley writes that “Former EPA officials contend that the shake-up takes chemical assessments out of the hands of career scientists, potentially to the detriment of public health.”
As evidence of this shift, Daley writes that that the agency has reduced the number of its ongoing chemical toxicity assessments from twenty to three.
The IRIS Program began in 1985 to support EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment by identifying and characterizing the health hazards of chemicals found in the environment. The IRIS program has become the most respected scientific program in the agency. Its health assessments are the backbone of EPA risk analysis work and is the preferred source of toxicity information used by EPA to determine public health risks. It is also an important source of toxicity information used by state and local health agencies, other federal agencies, and international health organizations.
The TSCA program on the other has a much narrower focus which is primarily on reporting, record-keeping and testing requirements, and restrictions relating to chemical substances and/or mixtures, according to EPA’s website. Certain substances are not covered by TSCA including food, drugs, cosmetics and pesticides. While the 2016 amendment to TSCA greatly improved this regulation, it did not address its narrow focus. This shift began with the leadership of Andrew Wheeler who took over for a beleaguered Scott Pruitt as administrator of EPA in July 2018.
One EPA official who declined to be identified was quoted in the Daley article saying that IRIS and TSCA are “very different” in their approaches to evaluating the public health risks posed by exposure to chemicals. “One could make the argument that this is political interference, in that high-level people are saying which methodology we should be using to assess the safety of a chemical. “And the policy’s pretty clear that they’re not supposed to do that.”
Bernard Goldstein, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, who served as EPA Assistant Administrator of the Office of Research and Development (ORD) from 1983 to 1985, summed it up this way in the Daley article, “I really see this as part of a restructuring of EPA in such a way that science will have very little to do with what EPA is basing its regulation on, and that we will end up with much weaker regulations in terms of protecting public health. “It’s troubling, in large part because it’s very consistent with an overall approach – a very astute approach – to take out the inconvenient facts.” Also cited in the same article was a comment by Thomas Burke from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a former EPA lead scientist adviser and Deputy Administrator of ORD from 2015 to 2017, “’any reduction’ of the number of IRIS chemical assessments ‘is a loss for public health and, unfortunately, puts populations who are exposed at risk.’”
Read the full article here.
Vermont legislators have just passed a bill that will require schools to test water for lead, and that will require the state to pay for it. The bill comes after increased national concern about potential toxins in school water systems: just last year, Vermont tested water in 16 schools, and all were found to have traces of lead in their water. <Read more>
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Corroded faucets can be a source of water contamination / Pixabay Creative Commons
In August 2018, a dive group found barrels containing the two specific toxic chemicals required to make Agent Orange at the bottom of Wallowa Lake, Digital Journal reports. One of these chemicals is known to be contaminated with dioxins, which were used in Oregon forests as a herbicide until higher rates of miscarriages were reported in 1979. Residents were alarmed, not only because the lake is treasured by the community but also because it provides drinking water to the nearby town Joseph. However, Oregon DEQ still has not pulled these barrels out of the lake. <Read more>
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If the public is going to have a robust debate about the merits of fracking, both sides need to know what’s being pumped into the ground. <Read more>.