United States: The latest expert reports suggest that in an analysis of drinking water in the United States, scientists at the Silent Spring Institute revealed that about one-third of people in America have come across uncontrolled contaminants that could give rise to diseases.
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The study also reveals that Hispanics and Blacks are more impacted than other ethnicities, exposed to dangerous contaminants on a larger scale, and live closer to sources of pollution.
These sources reveal that nearly a hundred contaminants can, at the present time, be prohibited under the USEPA Safe Drinking Water Act.
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As a result, public water utilities need to sample these chemicals and work to make certain that levels are not above particular levels by putting in new treatment technologies and other appropriate steps.
What more are the experts stating?
According to the co-author Laurel Schaider, a senior scientist at Silent Spring Institute, “Yet, we know there are thousands of other harmful chemicals that are not regulated that make their way into groundwater and surface waters and some of these chemicals can ultimately end up in drinking water supplies,” scitechdaily.com reported.
Schaider and her team focused on data captured in the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR) program gathered from 2013 to 2015.
Houses with high concentrations of the Hispanic and Black population, in general, were more exposed to those unregulated contaminants in drinking water and in closer communities around the wastewater treatment plant, airports, military operation fields, industrial sectors, etc.
“Our findings show that the percentage of Hispanic and Black residents in a community is a consistent predictor of poorer water quality,” described the lead author Aaron Maruzzo, a scientist at Silent Spring Institute.
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Prior research has estimated that PFAS may be found in about 45% of US drinking water supplies. Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency (@EPA) does not regulate PFAS, though that will change in 2029… pic.twitter.com/d6aCo9q4vq
As recent testing has indicated, PFAS substances are nearly three times more prevalent in drinking water than has been estimated, and therefore, the number of residents affected by the contaminants at the time the information was gathered is still very low, according to Schaider.
In April 2024, the EPA proposed the National Primary Drinking Water Regulation for six out of the eighteen PFAS contaminants that had been in existence for eighteen years.
The study, therefore, recommends that the federal government should do more to help communities of color mitigate the effects of pollution by regulating additional contaminants, scitechdaily.com reported.
“Ultimately, we need to do a better job at protecting source waters and reducing discharges of pollutants into water bodies that feed into our drinking water supplies,” Schaider continued.