Researchers are learning more about the adverse impacts on the environment and human health of PFAS, shorthand for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Nicknamed “forever chemicals” because they are difficult to destroy, they are widely used in everything from cosmetics to clothing to firefighting foam. Government agencies are picking up the pace to regulate their use.

Tap water is one of the main ways humans encounter PFAS. At least 45% of tap water in the United States is contaminated with one or more PFAS, researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimate in a study published this summer.

The PFAS issue touches many journalistic beats, including business, consumer, environment, health, infrastructure, legal and local services. So chances are good that if you’re a journalist, you’ll encounter PFAS in your reporting.

To help inform news coverage of the topic, we enlisted advice from researchers and journalists including Kelly Smalling, a research chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey and lead author of the aforementioned study; Linda Birnbaum, the former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program; E.A. Crunden, a reporter for Politico’s E&E News who covers water issues; Barbara Moran, a climate and environment correspondent at WBUR in Boston who has reported extensively on PFAS; Rebecca Fuoco, the director of science communications at Green Science Policy Institute; and Jamie DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University who follows PFAS closely.

1. Start with the basics.

Journalists should be aware that PFAS are “a complicated class of over 12,000 man-made chemicals with distinct properties making them resistant to degradation and persistent in the environment,” Smalling said in an email interview. “They have been manufactured since the 1940’s but until recently, information on health implications were limited.” 

Journalists also should know and note why PFAS are nicknamed “forever chemicals.” It’s because they stick around for a long time due to their structure. They have a chain of linked carbon and fluorine atoms, with this combination being one of the strongest bonds in chemistry. By contrast, proteins and sugar compounds have relatively weak bonds, allowing the body to easily disassemble them. Manmade PFAS compounds don’t degrade under typical conditions in the environment or the body.

The compounds have likely wound their way into the environment in the decades since their invention, including into sources of water used for drinking worldwide. In recent decades, certain kinds of PFAS chemicals have been linked to serious health issues, including potentially higher risk for some cancers, autoimmune diseases, thyroid issues, liver disease, fetal complications, vaccine resistance and high cholesterol, among other concerns.

It’s worth “several hours of your time one day to bone up on the basics,” especially if you don’t have a science or health coverage background, says WBUR’s Moran.

This page from the Interstate Technology Regulatory Council, a state-led coalition with public and private members from all 50 states and Washington D.C. is a good place to start, she says.

“It contains a lot of straight-up, detailed PFAS info, and even an introductory video to get people started,” Moran notes. 

Many universities with scientists who research PFAS also have good resources for journalists, according to Dewitt, Moran and Crunden. Moran recommends Northeastern University’s PFAS Project Lab website. It includes news, background, a newsletter and information on upcoming conferences. DeWitt recommends the North Carolina State Center for Environmental Health Effects of PFAS or The University of Rhode Island’s STEEP (Sources, Transport, Exposure and Effects) website.

For health-specific information, start with the comprehensive 2022 National Academies report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The nonprofit Silent Spring Institute “can also be very helpful, and they are doing interesting research on the long-term health effects of drinking PFAS-contaminated drinking water,” Moran says.

The EPA and other agencies offer a plethora of information on government studies and upcoming rules. Those include the Food and Drug Administration,  the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Defense Department.

2. Note what’s happening with PFAS regulation on a national and local level.

In March, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took a major step by proposing limits on six kinds of PFAS in drinking water under the national Safe Water Drinking Act. If enacted, the rule would cover the first new contaminant under the act since the 1990s. The EPA intends to issue the final rules by the end of the year. The new regulations, if finalized, won’t apply to private wells, notes Birnbaum.

The lower levels will likely require more than half of municipal water systems to install filtration devices, she explained in an e-mail interview.

Though the proposed rule would be the first to regulate PFAS in drinking water at a national level, half of all U.S. states already either regulate or are moving to regulate PFAS in drinking water, according to Safer States, a public advocacy group that tracks state legislation and policy.

3. Be specific and careful with your terminology.

It’s important to note that the umbrella term PFAS covers  more than 12,000 kinds of man-made chemicals,  an omission that pops up in some coverage, said Crunden.

The EPA proposed rule, for instance, applies to six kinds of those 12,000 PFAS chemicals, “and even within that there are thresholds” for the other PFAS that the EPA seeks to regulate as mixtures, Crunden said in an email interview.

Specificity also is important when reporting on the health risks of PFAS. “Any strong PFAS reporting lays out what we do know versus what we don’t re: the science and health implications,” Crunden explained. “Reporters should not buy into saying 12,000+ chemicals ‘cause cancer’; that simply has not been proven yet and research is limited. But good PFAS journalism should see you comfortably empowered to say at least two chemicals are strongly linked to cancer, and that there are concerns about the broader family, which also pose a number of other health issues.”

Another terminology clarification: Toxins is the correct term for naturally occurring poisonous substances, Crunden explained, so it’s not accurate to refer to PFAS as toxins. PFAS are man-made, which makes them toxicants, not toxins. “Toxic chemicals” would also be an accurate way to describe PFAS.

4. Keep your accuracy radar on high and double-check what sources say.

“A good way to get a feel for accuracy is to sense how much someone hedges their statements,” Crunden noted. “Advocates, while well-meaning, will tend to oversell something (remember, saying something ‘causes cancer’ is an enormous statement and VERY hard to prove scientifically). Industry members, by contrast, will downplay things significantly.”

You can find tips on how to characterize research findings accurately in this tip sheet from The Journalist’s Resource.

Even scientists can make mistakes, especially those not steeped in PFAS research, says Jamie DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University who follows PFAS closely.

“Listen very carefully, because in the world of PFAS and some worlds of science, some words sound very similar,”  DeWitt said. “Make sure to check what your scientists say. Because I’ve seen some scientists get interviewed on the topic, who aren’t really engaged in PFAS science. And they’ve made some really simple mistakes.”

5. Befriend a toxicologist.

Find a public health, public works or university toxicologist familiar with PFAS and ask to sit down with them, DeWitt, Crunden and Moran recommend – especially one who specializes in drinking water.

Many cities and towns have someone whose job it is to know the rules and the science. If you can’t find a local government toxicologist, find someone at a university who can be your  “check on things,” Moran says.

That helps with PFAS science, whether it be tied to the environment or health, Dewitt says.

“I don’t think that necessarily journalists get things wrong, but they might not talk to scientists to have all of the details correct because PFAS science is really complex,” DeWitt says.

Universities with research departments often have PFAS experts that can be good sounding boards, even if you’re not quoting them, Crunden notes.

“Fact-check everything someone tells you and normalize having some go-to scientist sources you trust,” Crunden said. “Researchers attached to universities are some of the most reliable, in my opinion.”

6. Monitor academic research, keeping in mind that much of it never makes it into the news media.

The pace of research is picking up in areas including human health, techniques to better destroy or degrade PFAS chemicals, and in gathering data for where they are most pervasive in the environment, water and other products.

Still, just a fraction of scientific and academic research makes it into the media, according to a study published in July 2023 in the journal Environmental Health led by researchers from the nonprofit Green Science Policy Institute who studied published papers on human health and PFAS.

Of 273 peer-reviewed epidemiological studies on PFAS and human health  published between 2018 and 2020, fewer than 8% issued a press release, the researchers found. Studies with press releases were 20 times more likely to wind up in news stories.

A good practice is to create alerts on services like PubMed and Eureka Alert! Many scientific studies are published behind a firewall. But journalists often can get access to scientific papers for free – if they know how to ask. This piece from The Journalist’s Resource outlines how to set up free accounts with several top academic journal publishers.

This research roundup and explainer, published as a companion to this tip sheet, summarizes several studies on where PFAS is found in drinking water geographically, health impacts, the efficacy of consumer water filters, new methods of destroying PFAS, and racial disparities in PFAS exposure.

“As papers are published, you can go through them to see if anything stands out to you,” says Fuoco, the lead author of the Green Science study whose full-time job is to publicize PFAS studies on human health. “And there’s always a corresponding author who has contact information.”

7. Go to a public water board or local government meeting where PFAS is being discussed, or attend state hearings.

As with any topic, some of the best story ideas come from meeting people you wouldn’t normally encounter just working the phones or doing online research, Moran says.

“If your state is considering legislation, try to attend the hearings or watch or listen to them, because that’s where you get good story ideas,” she says.

One way to communicate the situation clearly is to focus on a linear storyline, such as an area where water is provided through public wells, which are less studied and regulated than municipal water systems. A single water system, community or family’s story can be a good way to “wrap your head around it,” Moran says.

For journalists interested in covering PFAS legislation as a statewide issue, Moran recommends looking at Safer State’s 2023 website of current and anticipated actions across the country.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has state-by-state information on PFAS and drinking water. And the map and key issue page from the advocacy group Environmental Working Group are also good places to start.

Reporting resources

Information from the EPA and other U.S. government agencies:

Start with the main PFAS page, an explanation of PFAS chemicals, the agency’s “strategic roadmap” for PFAS chemicals and the page outlining materials tied to the draft regulation announced in March.

Also see this March report from the White House National Science and Technology Council across agencies.

This graphic from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry shows the “PFAS family tree.”

The EPA also offers information on:

• Water filter use and steps consumers can take to cut their PFAS exposure
• Water testing
• Health advisories
• Long-term health effects and environmental risks
• Details of its fifth water•testing efforts under the agency’s unregulated contaminant monitoring rule which will provide information on 29 kinds of PFAS chemicals
• Comments on the proposed drinking water rule can be found on Regulations.gov. Sort through to find a local community, business, government or other entities. Often, the commentary has contact information for the author or authors.

Information on individual U.S. states:

• The nonprofit Safer States has information and maps on PFAS for the status of regulation in each state.
• The advocacy nonprofit Environmental Working Group offers a key issue page and interactive map.
• Bloomberg’s PFAS activity tracker keeps up on litigation, regulation and other changes.
• The Interstate Technology Regulatory Council has primers, videos and more.
• You’ll find links to drinking water agencies in each state from the Association of Drinking Water Administrators.

Other useful information:

• The American Water Works Association’s statement on PFAS and the EPA proposed regulation
• Bluefield Research, a Boston-based consulting firm

• The European Chemical Agency’s proposal to severely restrict PFAS use
• Canada’s draft state of PFAS report

• The American Chemistry Council’s webpage on PFAS chemicals

The post 7 tips for covering stories about PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water (and a list of reporting resources) appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

If it feels like news coverage of the compounds colloquially named “forever chemicals” is everywhere, there’s a reason: The pace of research and likely government regulation for PFAS, short for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, is accelerating.

In March, the U.S. The Environmental Protection Agency proposed limits on six PFAS in drinking water under the national Safe Water Drinking Act. If enacted, the rule would cover the first new contaminant under the act since the 1990s. The EPA intends to issue the final rules by the end of the year. The move is part of the Biden administration’s plans to fight PFAS pollution.

PFAS contamination in air, soil and water is a worldwide problem that many governments and agencies have begun addressing, including the European Union,  Canada and Japan.

Journalists would do well to educate themselves on PFAS because the issue now touches almost every beat: business, consumer, environment, health, infrastructure, legal and local municipalities that include water utilities. That’s why we created this explainer and research roundup. (For more on covering PFAS, see our related tip sheet, which includes a list of data resources.)

Let’s start with the basics. What are PFAS?

PFAS are a group of more than 12,000 man-made chemicals and compounds used in all kinds of products since the 1940s, according to the EPA’s master list. 3M, which created the first PFAS, began selling it to DuPont in the 1950s for use in nonstick cookware. PFAS compounds stave off heat, grease, oil and water. Manufacturers use or have used versions of them in products, including firefighting foam, construction materials, non-stick cookware, cosmetics, clothing, and food containers, to name a few. 

PFAS are made up of a chain of linked carbon and fluorine atoms. Because the man-made compounds don’t degrade easily in the environment — or the human body — they have earned the “forever chemicals” nickname.    

The most studied types of PFAS, are perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS). Both were mostly phased out in the mid-2000s by the manufacturers, according to the EPA. Yet they remain in the environment and find their way into drinking water from contaminated sources including surface areas. The EPA is targeting four other chemicals that when used in combination are designed to replace PFOA and PFOS in some consumer and industrial products. These mixtures can pose a health risk ”greater than each chemical on its own,” according to the EPA.

Those chemicals, made up of fewer carbon atoms, “are more quickly eliminated from the human body than PFOA and PFOS,” according to an EPA fact sheet. “They are still persistent in the environment.”

In recent decades, certain PFAS  have been linked to numerous health issues, including potentially higher risk for some cancers, autoimmune diseases, thyroid issues, liver disease, fetal complications, vaccine resistance and high cholesterol, among other concerns. Even very small amounts of certain kinds of PFAS may pose health risks over a lifetime.

“We are all contaminated with PFAS, and nearly all of our drinking water is also contaminated,” said Linda Birnbaum, the former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program in an email to The Journalist’s Resource.

Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey in August 2023 published a paper estimating that at least 45% of tap water in the U.S. contains at least one or more types of PFAS. Their study covers both tap water for municipal systems as well as private wells and rural drinking water systems. That’s important to note, as the EPA’s proposed rules do not include private wells.

“If the average American is worried about the quality of their drinking water, they can use this and other studies to get informed, evaluate their own personal risk and reach out to their local health officials about testing or treatment,” Kelly Smalling, lead author of the study and a research chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said in an email interview.

A 2020 study from the watchdog nonprofit Environmental Working Group (summarized below) estimates more than 200 million people — nearly two-thirds of Americans — have tap water contaminated with a mixture of the PFAS compounds at concentrations exceeding 1 parts per trillion, or ppt. That’s the equivalent of about one drop of PFAS in 20 Olympic sized swimming pools.

Research is “still ongoing to determine how different levels of exposure to certain PFAS may lead to adverse health outcomes,” according to the EPA.    

PFAS chemicals can last in the human body for a long time. Some have a half-life, or the time it takes the body to cut the presence of a substance to about half, of about eight years. They are mainly removed from the body by excretion, mostly through urine.      

What is the state of PFAS regulation in the United States?

There are currently no federal regulations for PFAS in drinking water.

But half of all U.S. states already either regulate or are moving to put limits on certain kinds of PFAS, according to Safer States, a public advocacy group that tracks state legislation and policy. The National Association of State Legislatures has state-by-state information on PFAS and drinking water.

And EWG tracks PFAS in drinking water across the country. It has data and an interactive map highlighting its findings. As of June 2022, EWG estimates some 2,858 locations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam have contaminated drinking water.

In 2016, the EPA issued an advisory to keep the combined levels of PFOA and PFOS in drinking water at 70 parts per trillion, or ppt, either separately or combined.

The March 2023 proposed national rule was released under  a 2019 formal PFAS action plan that also includes potentially establishing drinking water standards., and an update to that plan in 2020 that includes calls for establishing what’s called a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for PFOA and PFOS in drinking water. And as of July 1, 2023, 180 kinds of PFAS must be reported to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory program, which tracks the release of chemicals from industry and government.

The levels in the proposed drinking water rule announced in March call for levels far below that, at 4 ppt, for PFOA and PFOS, the lowest level most labs can detect for these two most studied kinds of PFAS. A “hazard index” is proposed to regulate the remaining four compounds commonly blended together and used as replacement chemicals for PFOA and PFOS.  They are: Perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid (HFPO-DA, commonly known as GenX Chemicals),  Perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS) and Perfluorobutane sulfonic acid (PFBS).

If finalized, the proposed regulation would mandate public water systems monitor, notify the public and bring down the level of the PFAS chemicals to the new standards. 

In June 2023, 3M announced a preliminary $10.3 billion settlement with thousands of public water suppliers that had sued over PFAS contamination and announced it planned to stop making PFAS chemicals by 2025. (It had already agreed to “phase out” some forms of PFAS in 2000.) The 3M settlement announcement followed a similar $1.2 billion announcement from DuPont, Chemours and Corteva.

But 22 attorneys general asked a judge in late July to block the 3M settlement saying it doesn’t do enough to resolve claims and is too restrictive on how cities and towns can use the funds, Politico reported.

In a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 3M listed details of the proposed settlement including what systems are eligible. It’s worth a look at the public information for journalists searching for story ideas or information about specific communities and the settlement.   

How much does it cost to remove PFAS?

Many water utilities will have to improve filtration and systems to reduce the levels of PFAS in drinking water, especially in states that haven’t broached their own regulations already. The proposed EPA drinking water rule does not apply to private wells.

Because the chemicals are difficult to eradicate, upgrading water systems will be expensive.

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provides about $9 billion in funds over five years tied to PFAS, according to the White House. According to an EPA fact sheet, that breaks down to:
• $4 billion through the Drinking Water State Revolving Funds, including a requirement states earmark 25% for “disadvantaged communities or public water systems serving fewer than 25,000 people.”
 • $5 billion as grants via the Emerging Contaminants in Small or Disadvantaged Communities (EC-SDC) Grant Program, which promotes “access to safe and clean water in small, rural, and disadvantaged communities while supporting local economies” In February 2023, the EPA announced the first $2 billion of this funding was available.

Still, some communities worry that the federal funding is insufficient. The EPA estimates it will cost utilities $772 million to $1.2 billion to comply if the proposed rule is finalized. Utilities might have to increase water bills to pay for the costs, not a popular move for any municipal budget.

The American Water Works Association, whose members include public utilities, said in March it expects the cost to reach $3.8 billion annually for utilities to install recommended treatment systems for PFOA and PFOS removal, citing an analysis undertaken for the group by the firm Black & Veatch.

The EPA also estimated economic benefits of $908 million to be $1.2 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg Law.

“One of the important things that the EPA does when it puts out a draft rule like this, is to consider the economic costs and benefits,” says Jamie DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University who follows PFAS closely. “While the cost might translate to individual homeowners in terms of an increase in their water bill, it also means that there will be fewer economic costs imposed on individuals and societies due to the chronic diseases that have been linked to PFAS exposures.”

What have journalists been missing?

PFAS chemicals weren’t widely studied in the environment until the early 2000s, notes a fact sheet from the nonprofit Interstate Technology and Regulatory Council, a state-led coalition with public and private members from all 50 states, and Washington D.C. Since then, it’s been a “very active area of research,” according to the group. 

Yet many studies on PFAS don’t make it into media coverage unless researchers issue a press release, according to a study published in July 2023 in the journal Environmental Health, led by researchers from the nonprofit Green Science Policy Institute.

Of 273 peer-reviewed epidemiological studies on PFAS and human health  published between 2018 and 2020, fewer than 8% issued a press release, the researchers found. Those that issued a release were 20 times more likely to draw attention from journalists.

The number of important studies that appear to be overlooked was surprising, says lead author Rebecca Fuoco, whose full-time job is to publicize PFAS studies. 

“When studies are unpublicized, that is, not covered in the media, they’re also reaching fewer scientists,” Fuoco says. “We found a correlation between media coverage and scholarly citation. There were studies that my scientist colleagues had not seen or didn’t know about, which was even more shocking to see.”

It’s important to pay attention to the research when covering PFAS issues. To get you started, here are summaries of six recent studies along with suggestions of related studies for you to read. The studies cover where PFAS is found in drinking water geographically, health impacts, the efficacy of consumer water filters, new methods of destroying PFAS, and racial disparities in PFAS exposure.

Research Roundup

Population-Wide Exposure to Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances from Drinking Water in the United States
David Q. Andrews and Olga V. Naidenko. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, October 2020.

The study: This research from the Environmental Working Group analyzes PFAS and PFOS found in drinking water in the United States using publicly available data from the EPA, the U.S. Geological Survey, Colorado, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina and Rhode Island. The researchers estimate the number of people in the United States who may be exposed to combined PFAS in drinking water at concentrations above 1 part per trillion, or ppt (equivalent to 1 nanogram per liter) and above 10 ppt.

The findings: The EWG scientists estimate more than 200 million people — nearly two-thirds of Americans — have tap water contaminated with a mixture of the PFAS compounds at concentrations exceeding 1 ppt, in part because PFAS chemicals are “nearly ubiquitous” in surface water, the predominant source of drinking water in the U.S. They based their estimates on a total U.S. population of approximately 330 million, with 297 million served by community water systems and 241 million people served by systems tested in 2013-2015 through the EPA’s Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Program. The researchers also estimate between 18 million and 80 million people may be exposed to combined PFOA and PFOS concentration in drinking water at concentrations above 10 ppt.

The authors write: “The overall prevalence of PFAS in drinking water, revealed by testing with sensitive analytical limits, suggests that the majority of large metropolitan surface water systems in the U.S. may contain detectable PFAS. Conventional drinking water treatment is typically ineffective for PFAS.”     

Why we’re highlighting this study: This study uses publicly available data from both federal and state sources. It details sample locations and the method used to extrapolate the figure showing broad contamination is likely. It also provides a preliminary estimate of contamination from private wells, often difficult to survey.

Related study:

•  Detection of Poly- and Perfluoroalkyl Substances (PFASs) in U.S. Drinking Water Linked to Industrial Sites, Military Fire Training Areas, and Wastewater Treatment Plants
  Xindi C. Hu, et al.Environmental Technology & Science Letters. Aug. 9, 2016.

Low-temperature mineralization of perfluorocarboxylic acids: Forever chemicals’ Achilles’ heel
Brittany Trang, et al. Science, August 2022. 

The study: All PFAS have at least one carbon atom that is fluorinated — a near indestructible structure. In this study, researchers use a new process to “deflourinate” a kind of PFAS, called PFCA      : they mix water and a solvent called dimethyl sulfoxide at relatively low temperatures (80 to 120 degrees centigrade) compared with other methods. That leaves carbon and inorganic fluoride, two far less harmful substances. Under laboratory conditions, the combination then breaks down within 24 hours after adding  sodium hydroxide, also known as caustic soda or lye.

The findings: Scientists found a weakness in the PFAS structure by targeting one end of the molecule in a process that heats PFAS in dimethyl sulfoxide with sodium hydroxide. Sodium hydroxide is what’s known as a reagent — a compound used to start a chemical reaction. The process broke down PFAS molecules quickly into relatively benign substances. The scientists successfully tested the method on 10 kinds of PFAS, including perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids (PFCAs), perfluoroalkyl ether carboxylic acid (PFECAs), PFOAs and GenX (the trade name of a compound developed by DuPont). 

In the authors’ words: “In contrast to other proposed PFAS degradation strategies, the conditions described here are specific to fluorocarbons, destroy concentrated PFCAs, give high fluoride ion recovery and low fluorinated by-product formation, and operate under relatively mild conditions with inexpensive reagents. The proposed mechanism is consistent with both computational and experimental results, provides insight into the complexity of PFAS mineralization processes, and may be operative but unrecognized in other PFAS degradation approaches.”

Why we’re highlighting this study: This study shows a simple process for breaking down one kind of  PFAS atomic structure. Scientists are now investigating how to use it for large amounts of PFAS chemicals outside the lab. While most methods use filters to remove PFAS, this method, if it can be used widely, breaks them down. The study drew widespread attention and hope that “forever” might not be forever after all.

Related studies: 

• Recent advances in electrochemical decontamination of perfluorinated compounds from water: a review
  Fuqiang Liu, et al Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering, February 2023.
• Electrochemical degradation of PFOA and its common alternatives: Assessment of key parameters, roles of active species, and transformation pathway
  Fatemeh Asadi Zeidabad, et al. Chemosphere, February 2023.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in United States tapwater: Comparison of underserved private-well and public-supply exposures and associated health implications
Kelly Smalling, et al. Environment International, August 2023.

The study: Scientists from the U.S. Geological survey set out to compare human PFAS exposure in tap water from publicly regulated supply and unregulated private well systems, the most comprehensive survey  to date. The researchers note that there’s limited information on PFAS in residential tap water , especially for consumers who get their water from private wells. Many studies look at water sources, like lakes and groundwater, rather than the residential tap. Roughly one in eight U.S. residents get water from private wells. Researchers aggregated sampled tap water results from 716 locations (269 private wells and 447 public supply systems) across the U.S. during 2016 to 2021. They tested for 32 types of PFAS. The samples were assessed by three labs and compared with possible contamination sources, like industrial sites that may contaminate sources of drinking water.

The findings: The researchers estimate at least 45% of tap water in the U.S. contains at least one or more types of PFAS, with figures ranging from one to nine types, with a median of two different PFAS types in. The research also confirms previous studies that found urban areas are more likely to have PFAS in tap water. The authors estimate the probability of not finding PFAS in tap water is about 75% in rural areas versus 25% in urban areas. Drinking water exposure, the scientists note, may be more common in the Great Plains, Great Lakes, Eastern Seaboard and central and southern California.

The authors say next steps may be to:

• Integrate more geospatial datasets and PFAS data to better identify vulnerable regions and populations.
• Expand monitoring to include rural small-and private-well dependent communities.
• Expand analysis methods used by drinking water monitoring programs in the U.S. and globally.

In the author’s words:  The findings support “the continued need for point-of-use tap water monitoring, with an emphasis on unmonitored private-wells and underserved communities on small community water supplies.”

Why we’re highlighting this study: There is limited information on PFAS in tap water on a national level, particularly from private well sources, from which about 45 million people get their water, many in rural areas. The authors note how prevalent PFAS chemicals are likely to be in urban water systems.

Related study:

• Comparative case study of legislative attempts to require private well testing in New Jersey and Maine
  Sara V. Flanagan and Yan Zheng. Environmental Science & Policy, July 2018.

Sociodemographic Factors Are Associated with the Abundance of PFAS Sources and Detection in U.S. Community Water Systems 
Jahred M. Liddie, Laurel A. Schaider and Elsie M. Sunderland.Environmental Science & Technology, May 15, 2023.

The study: In the first study of its kind, researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Silent Spring Institute, a non-profit organization that investigates environmental chemicals, evaluate communities with a higher population of Black and Hispanic/Latino residents and their exposure to PFAS chemicals in their drinking water supplies versus other communities. They examine PFAS concentrations from more than 44,000 water samples from 7,873 community water systems across 18 states collected between January 2016 and August 2022.

The findings: People living in communities with higher proportions of Black and Hispanic/Latino residents are more likely to have tap water contaminated with certain PFAS chemicals than people living in other communities. Roughly one in four people in the states studied were served by water systems with at least one kind of PFAS chemical detected above 5 nanograms per liter..

The authors also find that each possible source of PFAS chemicals inside a watershed  — an airport or a fire training area — could be associated with much higher levels of PFAS in drinking water systems. Water from watersheds with a higher concentration of those sites were also more likely to ultimately wind up in water systems that served Hispanic and Black communities versus those without the potential PFAS sources, the researchers find.

In the author’s words: Community Water Systems’ (CWS) “watersheds with PFAS sources served higher proportions of Hispanic/Latino and non-Hispanic Black residents compared to those without PFAS sources. CWS serving higher proportions of Hispanic/Latino and non-Hispanic Black residents had significantly increased odds of detecting several PFAS. This likely reflects disparities in the siting of PFAS contamination sources. Results of this work suggest that addressing environmental justice concerns should be a component of risk mitigation planning for areas affected by drinking water PFAS contamination.”

Why we’re highlighting this study:  This is the first study directly examining socioeconomic factors, PFAS levels in drinking water and potential sources of the contamination. As a new federal-level rule is rolled out by the EPA, more data may become available to researchers to parse broader and more detailed findings around the social justice aspects of PFAS and drinking water.

Assessing the Effectiveness of Point-of-Use Residential Drinking Water Filters for Perfluoroalkyl Substances (PFASs)
Nicholas J. Herkert, et al. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, March  2020.

The study: Researchers led by scientists at Duke University tested residential water filters used both inside home plumbing systems and in consumer products like water pitchers in two North Carolina regions. Because PFAS chemicals can be difficult to remove from full scale municipal and well water systems, the authors set out to look at how at-home filters performed. They collected 89 samples from 73 homes and screened for 16 different kinds of PFAS.

The findings: Under-the-sink “dual stage” and reverse osmosis filters showed “near complete removal” for the PFAS chemicals the researchers evaluated. In all, researchers looked at 89 water samples; 76 of those samples went through “point of use” or POU filters, on in-home devices, while 13 filtered water via “point of entry” or POE filters, where water enters the home. Other (and less expensive) types of filters didn’t work as well for PFAS chemicals overall. Of the PFAS chemicals tested, those with “long chain” molecules were easier to remove than “short chain” molecules, with up to 70 percent removal and 40 percent removal respectively.

In the authors’ words: “We demonstrated that residential activated carbon POU/POE systems have variable performance. While under-sink reverse osmosis systems appear to be an ideal option for removing PFAS, they have a high capital cost. Ultimately, an activated carbon filter should provide some removal of PFAS from drinking water… and have a lower capital cost.”

Why we included this study: With an increasing number of PFAS related stories in the news, we wanted to provide research on what consumers can do to lessen their exposure, particularly from drinking water.

Related reading:

• The Environmental Working Group tested filters for PFAS chemical removal in July 2023 and published its recommendations. Consumer Reports also offers a guide, compiled in conjunction with a 2021 report with The Guardian. And finally, this Q&A from the EPA answers a plethora of consumer-oriented questions, including those about drinking water filters.

Per‐and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance Toxicity and Human Health Review: Current State of Knowledge and Strategies for Informing Future Research
Suzanne E. Fenton, et al. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, March 2021. 

The study review: This overview published in 2021 surveys and assesses current research and what scientists know about PFAS chemicals and their toxicological effects, or what the chemicals and poisons do to a person’s body. The authors want to figure out a way to study more of the thousands of kinds of PFAS together rather than individually. The authors include and examine studies on PFAS chemical exposure that suggest a link to or higher risk of autoimmune disorders including thyroid disease, increased cholesterol levels, diminished vaccine response, low sperm count, liver damage, inflammatory bowel disease, increased risk of miscarriage, obesity and some cancers, among other impacts on human health.

The recommendations: The authors call for a way to better define relationships between a PFAS chemical’s structure and biomarkers, or indications that show a specific change or response in how the human body is supposed to operate. If a method can be found, scientists will learn more about a far larger number of PFAS chemicals than the limited number studied now, common effects and a way to respond to more versions of them in specific parts or areas of the body.

In the authors’ words: “There are only a handful of PFAS with enough health effects data for use in decision‐making, as evidenced by state‐led standard setting,” the authors write. “There are numerous health effects reported for those PFAS tested, which sets this family of chemicals apart from many others and elevates the need for precautionary action. With hundreds of PFAS lacking health effects data, translational research teams using innovative methodologies and carefully designed studies will be critical to our state of knowledge on human health toxicity of per‐and polyfluoroalkyl substances.”

Additional reading:  Scientific Basis for Managing PFAS as a Chemical Class,      
Carol F. Kwiatkowski, et al. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, August, 2020.

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Burns from hot tap water caused at least 60,000 injuries and 110 deaths in the U.S. between 2016 and 2018 and resulted in more than $70 million in hospital costs each year, according to a recent study, which recommends a simple device to help prevent the problem.

“The cost burden of hospital-treated tap water scald burns in the United States,” published in Injury Prevention in March, is one of the few to estimate the nationwide cost of tap water scald burns. Tap water scald burns involve faucets, bath, shower or sink water, as opposed to other types of scald burns, which involve hot water from other sources such as cookware.

The authors recommend thermostatic mixing valves, which can be installed in water heaters or at tap and shower fixtures, as an effective solution to reduce the risk of tap water scald burns. Also called anti-scalding valves, the devices automatically mix hot and cold water to deliver a desired temperature. They are relatively inexpensive, costing as little as $30, and can be installed by a qualified plumber.

“There’s a lack of awareness about this,” says Wendy Shields, the study’s lead author and senior scientist at Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy. “You might not think this is a risk, but this is how many people are hurt and we have a device to prevent this from happening.”

The study

Each year, an estimated 486,000 people in the U.S. are treated for burns. Scald burns, which are caused by contact with hot water, make up about a third of all burns in the U.S., according to the American Burn Association. Scald burns are most common in children under 5. Older adults and people with disabilities are also at a higher risk.

Parsing out different types of scald burns, including tap water, at a nationwide scale became more feasible for researchers in 2015, when the U.S. adopted newer version of the international disease classification codes, known as ICD-10, published by the World Health Organization. ICD-10 has several injury codes involving hot tap water, including contact with hot tap water, scalds from bath or tub, and running hot water.

Shields and her co-authors, Joseph Levy, Linda Chyr and Shannon Frattaroli, used 2016 to 2018 data from the federal Healthcare Cost Utilization Project, the nation’s most comprehensive source of hospital care data, and collected the data on hot tap water injuries.

The study was funded by a grant to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention. The authors reported no conflicts of interest.

Among their findings:

• Between 2016 and 2018, 52,088 people in the U.S. visited emergency departments for tap water scald burns. An additional 7,270 were hospitalized and 110 died at the hospital.
• In total, the cost of visits added up to $29.79 million for emergency department visits and $206.69 million for hospital stays.
• Among those who were hospitalized, 41% were white, 28% were Black and 17% were Hispanic. About 9% were listed as “others” and data was missing for 5%. Race data were not available for emergency department visits.

Also, Medicaid and Medicare paid for 67% of inpatient stays and 47% of emergency department visits, reflecting that scald burns disproportionally affect older adults and lower-income populations. Medicaid covers people whose income is below a certain government threshold, while Medicare covers people who are 65 and older, regardless of income. Both programs cover people who have disabilities.

“We’re all paying these costs with federal dollars, and it has a simple engineering solution,” says Shields.

She adds it’s likely more people get scald burns than the study’s estimates show, because some might go to urgent care instead or not seek care at all. Also, the estimated costs exclude follow-up care costs, such as rehabilitation, medication, and infection treatment and control and do not account for societal costs, such as burdens on caregivers, pain and suffering and other costs.

Scald burns and thermostatic mixing valves

The severity of hot tap water scald burns depends on the water temperature, the duration of exposure and age of the person, Shields explains. For a child, 120 degrees Fahrenheit water will result in serious burns in 9 minutes, whereas 130 F water will cause serious burn in 25 seconds and 140 F water in as little as 3 seconds.

In 1988, water heater manufacturers voluntarily agreed with the Consumer Product Safety Commission to preset all new water heaters to 120 F. The federal agreement followed two states passing laws to require water heaters to be preset to 120 degrees, Washington in 1983 and Wisconsin in 1987.

“So, the reason we recommend it to be 120 degrees is to give people the time to get out of the way,” says Shields.

This agreement did not involve thermostatic mixing valves. Also, consumers can manually change the water heater settings. And soon researchers realized that scald burns were still happening, especially among children, even with the 120 F preset for water heaters.

One study, focused on New York City and published in 2007 in the Journal of Burn Care & Research, found tap water scald burns remained a significant public health risk, especially in older homes that were exempt from a city law that required water heaters installed in all apartments built or renovated after 1997 to be set to a maximum temperature of 120 F.

Around the same time, Shields and her colleagues began testing the water heater temperature of 976 Baltimore homes. They found about 41% of homes had their water heater temperature set above 120 F. In “Still too hot: Examination of water temperature and water heater characteristics 24 years after manufacturers adopt voluntary temperature setting,” published in the Journal of Burn Care & Research in 2013, the researchers found in more than half of the homes the water heater gauge setting was more than 10 degrees off at a higher temperature.

“What we found is there’s a relationship between the size of the water heater and the temperature of the water,” Shields says. “No one wants to run out of hot water for their shower, so if your water heater isn’t big enough, what a family will do is raise it up higher.”

Homeowners were more likely have a safe hot water temperature than renters (63% versus 54%), Shields and her colleagues found. Also, households whose income was above the federal poverty level were more likely to have a safe hot water temperature compared with those whose income was below the federal poverty level (62% versus 57%).

In their latest paper, Shields and her co-authors write thermostatic mixing valves are a promising solution to prevent scald burns at homes. They call for policy proposals that require the use of thermostatic mixing valves in all homes.

Current federal building codes for new plumbing require mixing valves at each faucet, but plumbing installed before the codes were adopted in 1987 are not included in the requirement. So, even though thermostatic mixing valves are recommended by water heater manufacturers and the International Code Council, their installation in older homes is not required in the U.S. unless the plumbing system is being replaced.

“My work for the last 10 or more years has been really just trying to raise the profile of this problem,” says Shields, “so that we understand that we don’t want to just systematically exclude people who live in older homes, which are more likely to be renters, more likely to be low-income families, from the protection of this really simple engineering solution that we have.”

Meanwhile, several countries have adopted the temperature mixing valves as a standard.

Since 2002, Australia has required that all new and replacement hot water systems must be fitted with a temperature control device to ensure the water temperature does not exceed 122 F.

Canada has mandated thermostatic mixing valves to be installed with all new water heaters since 2004.

And a few studies have assessed and reported on the effectiveness of the devices.

• One study in Glasgow, Scotland, published in April 2011 in Injury Prevention, finds installation of thermostatic mixing valves as part of new buildings or major renovation with installation of a new bath in homes with children under the age of 5 is likely to produce cost savings.
• Another study, published in Archives of Disease in Childhood in February 2011, also assessing the effectiveness of the mixing valve installation in homes with children under 5, find the devices “and accompanying educational leaflets are effective at reducing bath hot tap water temperatures in the short and longer term and are acceptable to families.”
• One 1988 study published in the journal Burns notes the installation of thermostatic mixing valves at bath and shower outlets can “totally eliminate the risk of hot tap water scalds.” Even though installation of the valves in every household wouldn’t be feasible, “is a strong case for installing them in hospitals and residential homes for paediatric, geriatric and mentally/physically handicapped patients.”
• And a study published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine in 1993 recommends installation of temperature-control valves in showers to prevent scald burns among people with disabilities, older adults and young children.

“I would like it to just be integrated in the water heater or required as an add-on to the installation of a water heater if it’s an older house,” says Shields.

Shields recently replaced the water heater in her house and asked the plumber to install a mixing valve. “And my plumber said, ‘You don’t need it. You don’t have young kids. You’re not old.’ And I was like, ‘Everyone needs it. I have had other people stay at my house occasionally and I just want to feel safe that even if I’m not there, that water is still safe coming out of the tap.’”

Related research

“Burn injuries in the older population and understanding the common causes to influence accident prevention,” published in the journal Burns in June 2023, finds: “The main cause of burn injuries in the elderly of Yorkshire and Humber [England] was food preparation. The majority of the food preparation burn injuries were a scald burn due to the handling of hot fluids, either from a saucepan or a kettle. A prevention strategy aiming to make people aware of this finding can help reduce burn injuries in the over 65 years old age group.”

“Pediatric major burns: a monocentric retrospective review of etiology and outcomes (2008–2020),” published in the European Journal of Plastic Surgery in April 2022, finds: “Scalds were the main mechanism of injury (70.1%) and upper extremity was the most frequent location affected (68%). The 28.6% of patients suffered some complication, but the mortality rate was low (0.7%).”

“A state-wide analysis of pediatric scald burns by tap water, 2016–2018,” published in Burns in December 2020, finds “a significant number of scald burn injuries by tap water in children, particularly under 5 years.”

“Burn Injury,” published in Nature Reviews, Disease Primers, in February 2020, finds, “Development of international burn registries should facilitate better understanding of burn injury aetiologies in many vulnerable populations.”

“Pediatric Burns: A Single Institution Retrospective Review of Incidence, Etiology, and Outcomes in 2273 Burn Patients (1995–2013)” published in the Journal of Burn Care & Research in November 2016, finds “children 6 years or younger accounted for more than half of the burn-associated hospitalizations, and were more likely to be male children suffering scald burns.” Also, “Geographical analysis revealed significantly higher incidence of burns in areas with lower incomes.”

“Preventing childhood scalds within the home: Overview of systematic reviews and a systematic review of primary studies,” published in Burns in August 2015, finds, “The paucity of evidence we found highlights the need for research to investigate the effect of interventions on reducing the incidence of childhood scalds in the home, the safe handling of food and drinks, and safe kitchen and cooking practices.”

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Each year, there are an estimated 16 million cases of acute gastrointestinal illness in the U.S. stemming from contaminants in community water systems.

New research in The Review of Economics and Statistics finds quick notification of water problems can help keep households healthy, avoiding millions of dollars in lost job earnings and direct health care costs.

The research shows that timing matters: Households noticeably change their behavior by purchasing bottled water, but only when notified immediately of potential problems with their tap water.

“People tend to think that the water coming out of their tap is treated and clean and safe to drink,” says author Michelle Marcus, a health and environmental economist at Vanderbilt University. “But it’s actually fairly surprising how often these health-based drinking water violations occur even in the U.S., where we have pretty good water quality.”

In November, for example, residents of Millwood, Washington, faced a boil water order for nearly a week after samples showed elevated levels of coliform bacteria.

In October, water at an elementary school in Honolulu tested positive for coliforms following several nearby water main breaks.

In September, residents in west Baltimore were told to boil water after officials there found coliform contamination, including E. coli, in samples.

While coliform bacteria are generally not harmful to humans, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, federal regulators long maintained that coliforms are a bellwether for disease-causing viruses, parasites and bacteria.

The Environmental Protection Agency requires that community water systems, which can be public or privately owned, conduct regular tests for coliforms.

The public must be notified within 24 hours of acute violations. Acute violations happen when public health is immediately at risk — for example, if a water system detects thermotolerant coliforms such as E. coli, which can grow at relatively high temperatures and often indicate water contaminated with human or animal feces.

E. coli live naturally in the intestines, but certain strains can cause gastrointestinal illness, ranging from mild diarrhea to nausea and vomiting, with the risk of kidney failure in rare cases in very young and older people.

Federal regulations allow local water officials to use a variety of methods to issue public violations, including the news media or postal mail.

Until 2016, federal rules also required that most community water systems notify residents within 30 days when 5% of their monthly samples tested positive for total coliforms.

“Total coliforms are a group of closely related bacteria that are natural and common inhabitants of soil and surface waters,” according to a 2015 Environmental Protection Agency guidance document for community water systems serving under 1,000 people.

As of 2016, the federal government no longer requires that water systems of any size notify residents of coliform violations stemming from regular sampling — so long as any indications of fecal contaminants fall below prescribed levels and the water system identifies and fixes the problem.

In its final rule, which was published in 2013 but did not go into effect until 2016, Environmental Protection Agency officials maintain that the mere presence of coliforms “by themselves do not indicate a health threat.”

But the recent research shows that when the public is not notified of coliform violations in a timely way, there can still be costly consequences related to purchases of over-the-counter remedies, hospital stays and lost time at work.

Immediate notification, less sickness

Waterborne pathogens that cause gastrointestinal illness account for $160 million in direct healthcare costs each year in the U.S., according to research published in January 2021 in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The authors estimate an additional $2.39 billion in direct healthcare costs when people get sick from breathing contaminated water droplets — at a hot tub or spa, for example.

The new paper in The Review of Economics and Statistics explores how the timing of public notifications related to water quality issues affects household behavior.

Marcus focuses on coliform violations from 2004 to 2015 in North Carolina, because of the quality and detail of data available for the state. This period covers roughly the decade before the federal rule went into effect that made it so community water systems no longer had to tell the public about certain types of contamination identified during routine testing.

Acute violations — those arising from testing indicating an immediate health risk and requiring 24-hour public notice — led households in affected areas to increase bottled water purchases by roughly 78%, on average, during the month the violation occurred, Marcus finds.

Less severe violations related to routine testing — those requiring public notice within 30 days rather than 24 hours — did not, on the whole, affect bottled water purchases.

Marcus finds 60% of community water systems in North Carolina notified households of those less severe violations within one week. Yet for water systems that notified households within one day of less severe violations, bottled water sales increased 40% on average. Notifications sent beyond the first day did not affect bottled water purchases.

While the notification timing was available for North Carolina, the method of communication was “not systematically recorded,” Marcus says. But the research shows early notification of water problems can meaningfully change household behavior.

“The timing of information to the public really matters,” Marcus says. “That’s something that can broadly apply to many different violations for drinking water, and even violations for different types of pollution.”

Although most coliforms do not affect human health, Marcus notably links less severe violations — those that water systems typically took longer to communicate to the public — with more purchases of over-the-counter medicines for stomach distress.

That relationship was not evident for acute violations, indicating the uptick in purchases of clean bottled water following quick notifications helped people avoid sickness.

Hospital admissions were also linked to monthly violations, especially for school-aged children. Likewise, monthly violations were linked to school absences, especially for elementary school students.

Costs of delayed notification

Marcus figures the dollar costs related to immediate warnings about potentially harmful water compared with warnings that come later. If the public had been notified within 24 hours of all testing violations — even those that only required notification within 30 days — Marcus estimates bottled water purchases would have been $365,000 higher in North Carolina during the decade studied.

Marcus also estimates how much the violations that water systems were slower to communicate to the public cost residents in terms of medication purchases, hospital visits and time lost at work.

• Some $441,000 worth of over-the-counter gastrointestinal medicines were purchased due to coliform violations in North Carolina.
• Emergency department visits cost another $422,000.
• Assuming an average wage of $25 per hour and assuming one parent missed one work day for each day a student was absent from school, there were nearly $7 million in lost earnings over the decade.

These are, to be sure, “back-of-the-envelope” calculations, as Marcus writes in the paper. Considering the wages-lost estimate, for example, some parents will have paid time off and won’t have foregone earnings because their child missed school. Others might have nearby relatives to help.

Still, the rough total estimate of costs related to monthly coliform violations that were not immediately communicated to the public comes out to $7.7 million — well above the several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of bottled water that would have been purchased if the public had been immediately notified about every violation.

“The jury’s still out,” Marcus says, referring to the long-term effects of the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to no longer require public notifications for less severe coliform violations. But, she adds, her research “does indicate that previous to that revision, we were observing health effects for even that monthly coliform violation, which was thought not to matter very much in terms of health.”

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On April 25, 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, changed its municipal water supply source from the Detroit-supplied water coming from Lake Huron to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure. The new water source, however, was not treated and tested adequately, so it corroded the old water pipes, resulting in lead and other contaminants to enter drinking water.

By September 2015, a Virginia Tech research team found “serious levels of lead in the city water.” On Oct. 16, 2015, the city switched back to the Detroit water supply.

But the crisis didn’t end there.

By 2020, the rates of mental health disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder remained higher than average, according to a recent study in JAMA Network Open.

One in 5 Flint residents met the criteria for depression, 1 in 4 for PTSD and 1 in 10 for both depression and PTSD, estimates that exceed regional, national and global averages, according to “Prevalence of Depression and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Flint, Michigan, 5 Years After the Onset of the Water Crisis.” The study is based on in-depth online and mail surveys of 1,970 adult Flint residents between 2019 and 2020.

“We can’t know what percent is directly attributable to the crisis versus preexisting issues that have been around in Flint for a number of years, including disinvestment and concentration of poverty, which can influence mental health problems,” says Aaron Reuben, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral scholar at Duke University and the Medical University of South Carolina. “But we find that when you compare Flint to the wider country or to Michigan, depression and PTSD are significantly elevated and we were able to connect this elevation to experiences people had during the crisis.”

Although the statistical findings of the study may not be generalizable to other regions, they add to the existing body of literature documenting the mental health effects of human-caused disasters on communities.

“Environmental disasters have significant mental health consequences, particularly when they involve toxic chemicals, misinformation being distributed, possibly criminal negligence by public officials, and they last a long time,” Reuben says.

For public official and decision makers, the message is to make mental health response part of the crisis response, Reuben says. “And it should start at day one with the assessment of need.”

The study finds several factors associated with persistent mental health conditions following the Flint water crisis, including being female, an annual income below $25,000 and previous traumatic experiences. Those who felt the water crisis had affected their health or their family’s health were also significantly more likely to meet the criteria for depression or PTSD.

Low confidence in public officials and lack of trust in the accuracy of information given by them was also linked to whether people had mental health problems later, as they continued to worry about potential health complications from exposure to contaminated water or didn’t understand what they’ve been exposed to.

“Those things are psychologically stressful and can be limited by good communication campaigns” by public officials, Reuben says.

Also significant among the findings is access and use of mental health services.

Among the respondents, 34.8% said they were offered mental health services. Among those who were offered the service, 79.3% accepted it.

“We found that when you offer services, people do want them,” Reuben says.

Despite the study’s findings, Reuben emphasized that the Flint community is remarkably resilient.

“When you look at all of the crises, the stressors, the disinvestment that the community has gone through over not just the last few years, but decades, in a way, they’re doing remarkably well,” he says. “What we want to do is just highlight that there are a number of folks who are not doing as well as they could and that we want this to be bringing attention to the lingering needs in the community.”

More on the study and its findings

The survey was conducted between Aug. 13, 2019 and April 10, 2020. Most of the data were collected before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020, the authors write. Respondents were compensated with $35.

Slightly more than half of respondents were women. In total, 53.5% were Black, 42.5% white, 0.1% Asian, 0.3% Native American and 1.6% checked “other.” About 2% said they were more than one race.

Of the responding households, 56.8% had an annual income below $25,000 and 6.3% had an income above $75,000.

The authors say the final sample was demographically representative of Flint’s adult population. The city’s population was 80,628 in July 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Most of the respondents — 86.8% — lived in homes directly affected by the water crisis.

In total, 97.7% said they changed their behavior to avoid or reduce exposure to contaminated water by avoiding drinking, cooking or cleaning with it. Of the respondents, 76.9% reported spending money to lower their risk by taking measures such as buying bottled water for cooking and cleaning or replacing all pipes and fixtures in their homes.

At the time of survey, 80.1% said they were concerned that exposure to the contaminated water would have long-term effects on their health.

Based on survey results, the study estimates prevalence of depression in the city was 22.1% during 2019-2020, more than double that in Michigan (9.4%), the U.S. (7.8%) and globally (7.2%), according to the study.

Prevalence of PTSD was two-to-five times greater than rates among U.S. veterans after deployment (12.1%), the general U.S. population (4.7%) and estimated global averages (2.8%), the study estimates.

Aside from factors such as gender, income and lack of trust in public officials, previous traumatic experiences were also associated with higher risk of depression and PTSD after the water crisis.

Respondents who had past exposure to any potentially traumatic events were twice as likely to experience depression, 4.5 times as likely to meet the criteria for PTSD and 5 times as likely to report both depression and PTSD compared with the general populations.

Rates were even higher for individuals who reported past physical or sexual trauma. They were 3 times as likely to report depression, 6 times as likely to have PTSD and 7 times as likely to report both compared with the general populations.

“There’s plenty of reasons the mental health problems we’re seeing today will continue unless additional services [are provided in Flint],” says Reuben. “The crisis isn’t done necessarily.”

The study has several limitations. Researchers’ estimates of depression and PTSD are presumptive because the conditions were not diagnosed by a clinician. Also, the estimates could be low if those who responded to the survey were less impaired than those who did not participate, or, high if those with unmet mental health needs were more motivated to participate.

In addition, the study doesn’t establish causal relationships between the water crisis and mental health condition, the authors note. The study also didn’t measure actual lead exposure, but the perception of it.

More research on the mental health effects of environmental disasters

Researchers have long known that natural and human-caused disasters are stressful events, and that a certain portion of the affected population will develop mental health conditions. Most studies recommend including mental health outreach early in the crisis response.

Here are a few studies on the mental health effects of environmental disasters in the U.S.:

Jackson County, Mississippi: In November 1996, one of the largest human-caused disasters in U.S. history at the time was confirmed by officials in Jackson County, Mississippi: 1,800 homes and businesses had been contaminated with the pesticide methyl parathion during a 10-year period.

The chemical, approved by the Environmental Protection Agency for spraying over fields to control insects, was being used indoors, mainly by exterminators, to kill insects, especially cockroaches. The chemical affects the nervous system and high doses can cause death. By 1997, the EPA had spent $69 million to decontaminate homes and businesses. No deaths or serious injuries were linked to the pesticide, according to Stephen Braun’s 1997 narrative piece in the Los Angeles Times.

A 2000 study, published in the journal Health & Social Work, finds 55% of those affected by the contamination, regardless of contamination levels, had symptoms of depression. The study was based on phone or in-person surveys of 115 households, between October and December 1997.

“Mental health services and support groups should be made available immediately after the disaster and remain accessible for a couple of years after the cleanup begins,” the authors write. “Because victims are unlikely to actively pursue formal providers, public awareness campaigns should begin soon after the disaster and attempt to legitimize formal mental health services and make them more readily available and accessible for low-income people.”

Graniteville, South Carolina: In January 2005, a large chlorine spill in Graniteville, South Carolina, led to death of nine people and hospitalization of 72. At least 840 people received medical treatment at area hospitals and doctors’ offices.

A survey of 225 survivors about 10 months after the spill showed that 36.9% had symptoms of post-traumatic stress, according to a study published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology in November 2011. Also, 27% of respondents reported panic attacks.

“Our findings suggest that personnel providing mental health services should be especially considerate of those with serious physical injuries,” the authors write. “Perhaps even more important than exposure, the physical morbidity resulting from a disaster is a strong risk factor for psychological distress.”

Flint, Michigan: Researchers have also studied mental health outcomes of the Flint water crisis shortly after it happened.

A 2017 study, published in the Journal of Community Psychology, used online and mail surveys of 786 Flint residents, conducted between September 2015 and September 2016, to examine the relationship between perceptions of household tap water quality and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

Researchers find those who experienced poorer tap water quality during the water crisis experienced greater PTSD symptoms.

“The findings of our study underscore the negative effects of the Flint water crisis on adults and demonstrate the need for psychological interventions addressing the psychosocial effects of the crisis,” the authors write.

Jackson, Mississippi: The water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, resulting from the failure of the city’s water treatment plants in August 2022, is a more recent example of a water disaster.

A December 2022 study, published in the journal Sustainability, uses health data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to statistically compare the city of Jackson with eight nearby cities. It finds worse health status and health outcomes in Jackson compared with nearby cities, pointing to issues with the city’s hygiene and environmental health system.

“The urban water crisis in Jackson may already result in immense public health inequities, and the black communities experience significantly higher public health diseases than the majority-white cities,” writes the study’s author, Qingmin Meng. “The significantly worse mental and physical health status and the nine types of health outcomes in Jackson and Canton, which are majority-black cities in the Jackson region, than other seven non-majority black cities have showed Jackson may have started a critical degradation in public health that is still significantly threatening the black communities in Jackson, and likewise, the city of Canton.”

Meng compares the Jackson water crisis to Flint’s.

“Currently, the Jackson water crisis is significant yet overlooked for many years that may end up causing public health consequences even worse than Flint,” he writes.

Take-home message

Reuben says just providing more mental health services isn’t enough. Rather, there needs to be a holistic look at factors driving depression and PTSD in the community beyond a water crisis.

“We can’t go back and undo the crisis, but we can create a situation in which people feel that their needs are being looked after, that the information being provided by public officials are accurate,” he says.

He encouraged journalists to hold officials accountable, especially after published research points out the existing problems.

“We’ve got this study. Now what? Who’s going to do something with it?” he asks. “Get the response of folks in positions to make those decisions. What do they think of these findings? Go into the community and find people willing to be the representative, the voice and face of some of these problems.”

Additional reading

• “Experiences of the Flint Water Crisis Among Reproductive-Age Michigan Women in Communities Outside of Flint: Differences by Race and Ethnicity,” Sidonie K. Kilpatrick, et al. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, March 2022.
• “Lead-Laced Water In Flint: A Step-By-Step Look At The Makings Of A Crisis,” Merrit Kennedy, published on NPR in April 2016, details the timeline of the Flint water crisis.
• “‘Roach Men’ Left Toxic Trail,” Stephen Braun, published in October 1997 in the Los Angeles Times, explains the methyl parathion crisis in Jackson County, Mississippi.
• “Water, but not everywhere: Research sheds light on race and water access in metro areas,” Clark Merrefield of The Journalist’s Resource, published in November 2020, details a study that finds householders of color in the 50 largest metropolitan areas were 34% more likely to lack what the U.S. Census Bureau calls “complete plumbing” compared with white, non-Hispanic householders.
• “Racial disparities in access to running water: 5 studies to know,” Clark Merrefield of The Journalist’s Resource, published in November 2020, highlights five academic on the link between race and access to indoor running water.
• “Investigating stories on water access, affordability and safety: 5 tips to get started,” Clark Merrefield of The Journalist’s Resource, published in December 2020, lists five reporting tips for journalists.

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About 8 in 10 Americans carry a computer with them in the form of a smartphone but many in the U.S. still lack one of the most basic modern conveniences — running water at home.

New research in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences estimates 1.1 million people in the U.S. report lacking “complete plumbing,” which, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, consists of indoor hot and cold water and a bathtub or shower for the people who live there.

People who rent their homes are 61% more likely to lack complete plumbing than those who own their homes, find the authors of the new paper, “Geographies of Insecure Water Access and the Housing–Water Nexus in US Cities.”

They note that the Census Bureau often undercounts renters, people without homes and people of color, “demographics that are disproportionately plumbing poor.”

The Census Bureau has acknowledged that those groups are undercounted.

Given census undercounting, the authors estimate the real number of people in the U.S. that lack complete plumbing is likely closer to 2 million — roughly the size of the Kansas City metro area, for comparison.

Manny Teodoro, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies water affordability but wasn’t involved with the PNAS paper, points out that the number of people experiencing water insecurity may represent a small share of the U.S. population, but “a million or two people is a lot of people — and it should be unacceptable to us.”

The new research in PNAS reveals that piped water access remains a challenge for thousands of people living in cities, and also in rural areas. For local journalists across the U.S. and their audiences, water access is an underreported issue that matters.

Want to start investigating issues around water access, affordability and safety in your coverage area? We put together these five tips based on interviews with Teodoro and four others who have studied, experienced or reported on housing, race and water access, affordability and safety issues:

• Coty Montag, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and author of the 2019 report “Water/Color: A Study of Race and the Water Affordability Crisis in America’s Cities.”
• Ron Regan, chief investigator at News 5 Cleveland who leads the television station’s “Drowning in Dysfunction” investigative series on water affordability in the Cleveland area that began in 2015.
• Kwesi Reynolds, a filmmaker raised in Flint, Michigan, who lived through the water crisis there that drew national media attention in 2014 and 2015.
• Esther Sullivan, a University of Colorado Denver sociologist who has studied mobile home evictions for nearly a decade.

1. Remember that families experience water insecurity in the suburbs and rural areas, in addition to cities.

There are stories to be told about water affordability, access and safety in cities, and in suburbs and rural areas. Remember that poverty has spread to the suburbs and some of it is hidden, Sullivan says, and that issues around safe, piped water access affect renters and homeowners alike.

Take, for example, what Sullivan calls “informal subdivisions.” Those are mobile home parks where residents own their mobile homes and the land on which the homes sit, Sullivan explains. That land is often inexpensive and has little infrastructure, she says. Residents may rely on clean water being trucked in, or old wells that provide water with mineral or bacteria levels that exceed minimal safety standards.

“It’s important to look at a larger range of housing, not just urban apartments or subsidized housing,” Sullivan says.

2. If something seems strange, take a closer look. Newsroom investigations often start with questions about oddities that otherwise go unnoticed.

The News 5 Cleveland investigation led Regan and his team to pore over customer bills and public records.

But their investigation began with trinkets.

Reporters at the television station noticed the city of Cleveland’s water department giving away drinking cups, toothbrushes, backpacks and other schwag during weekend events around the city.

“That struck us as odd, since Cleveland is not flush with cash and it’s not like customers can actually ‘choose’ another provider,” Regan told Journalist’s Resource by email. “There’s no competition and no reason for self-promotion at ratepayer expense.”

The news team found the water department had spent nearly a half-million dollars over three years to promote itself. When the team started digging they “opened up a floodgate of reaction, including complaints of overbilling,” Regan said. Overbilling became a major focus of the station’s subsequent reporting.

3. Build relationships with residents before crisis hits.

“I think there is a misconception about people in crisis — like it’s their fault,” says Reynolds, the filmmaker raised in Flint.

The key to comprehensive, authentic storytelling, he says, is building a relationship of trust with the people whose stories are being told.

Reynolds adds that it’s also important to treat community members experiencing water crises as credible sources of information.

“I think city officials are great — they have a level of information that the average person may not have,” Reynolds says. “But I think there is a lot of knowledge and a lot of information that can come from the people who are living it and dealing with it.”

4. Ask the question, “What does the research say?”

Teodoro suggests journalists incorporate high-quality research into human interest stories. There is a wealth of peer-reviewed research from the past decade on water access, affordability and safety. Get up to speed on some of that research in our recent roundup of five studies on racial disparities in access to running water.

“There’s an ‘if it bleeds it leads’ aspect to the news reporting I’ve seen on water infrastructure and affordability,” Teodoro says. “What I would hope would be that journalists would temper their human interest stories and their clickbait-y headlines with sound research. I don’t mind the clickbait-y headlines if they’re backed by sound research. But sometimes they’re not.”

He adds: “If journalists advance good science, they facilitate the public interest.”

5. Start persistent and stay persistent, especially with public records requests.

Montag’s research on water affordability in Cleveland was spurred by the work of and communication with Regan’s investigative team.

In December 2019, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed suit against the City of Cleveland alleging that liens for unpaid water bills there have a discriminatory racial impact, with three times as many liens placed in majority Black neighborhoods compared with white neighborhoods in certain years, she says.

“I’m confident we would not have been able to do all that we did without that local news team following up,” Montag says. “Following up on leads and publicizing this brings the attention that is needed for long-term advocacy and change.”

Regan and his team filed open records requests and discovered “a mountain of problems, including failure to provide customers with water review board hearings to dispute bills.” His team reviewed budget expenses, customer complaint records, contracts with consultants, complaints filed with the state attorney general and better business bureaus, and court cases brought by utility customers.

Obtaining records hasn’t always been easy, Regan recalled. Government agencies sometimes refused to provide documents or were “painfully slow.”

“The only answer is persistence,” he told JR.

Reynolds agrees that persistence and follow-up are critical to exposing long-term inequities in water access and safety.

And remember, he says, just because a story is no longer in the national news doesn’t mean the story is over:

“Where are all the reporters now? How do we get our stories told now?”

Read more about new research on Americans who lack access to piped water in their homes, plus past research on racial inequality and water insecurity in the U.S.

The post Investigating stories on water access, affordability and safety: 5 tips to get started appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

An estimated 1.1 million people living in the U.S. report lacking some access to running water in their homes, with nearly three-quarters of them living in cities and suburbs, finds new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences based on Census Bureau survey data covering 2013 to 2017.

Householders of color in the 50 largest metropolitan areas are 34% more likely to lack what the U.S. Census Bureau calls “complete plumbing” compared with white, non-Hispanic householders, the authors find. The Census Bureau considers a household to have “complete plumbing” if it has running hot and cold water plus a bathtub or shower used only by people living in the dwelling.

Some 39% of households in the largest metro areas are represented by householders of color, but 53% of households in those areas that lack complete plumbing are represented by householders of color, they find.

Overall, the authors estimate 220,300 households and 514,000 people in the nation’s top 50 metro areas lack piped water in their homes — roughly half the number of people in the U.S. without complete plumbing.

“It is hard for many people to imagine that communities in the modern-day U.S. lack such a basic life necessity, but for those of us who work at the crux of infrastructure provision and social and spatial inequality, this story — the story of systemic inequality — is an old story,” lead author Katie Meehan, a senior lecturer in human geography at King’s College London, told Journalist’s Resource by email. “Our analysis shows that the effects of racial capitalism in the housing and water provision sectors are systemic and institutionalized, not random or accidental.”

The authors further find that renters in the top 50 metro areas are 61% more likely to lack complete plumbing compared with residents who own their homes.

According to the PNAS paper, “Geographies of Insecure Water Access and the Housing-Water Nexus in U.S. Cities,” metro areas with the highest percentages of households lacking complete plumbing include: San Francisco; Milwaukee; San Antonio; Cleveland; Los Angeles; New Orleans; New York; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; and Austin, Texas.

Metro areas generally encompass core cities and their surrounding suburbs.

The top five metro areas in terms of the estimated number of people without complete plumbing are New York, with more than 65,000; Los Angeles, with more than 44,000; San Francisco, with more than 27,000; Houston, with more than 20,000; and Miami, with nearly 19,000, according to the paper.

Water access, affordability and safety are three of the primary challenges for U.S. households struggling with water security. On Sept. 4 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put into effect a moratorium on residential evictions because “housing stability helps protect public health because homelessness increases the likelihood of individuals moving into congregate settings, such as homeless shelters, which then puts individuals at higher risk to COVID-19,” the agency wrote in its order.

The American Medical Association agreed in a recent legal brief, explaining that the eviction moratorium is helping renters maintain physical distancing, self-quarantining and hand hygiene. People without a piped connection to water in some areas may still be able access clean water — by purchasing purified water from a store, for example, or retrieving water from other sources, such as a stream.

Water access, affordability and safety are three of the primary challenges for U.S. households struggling with water security.

With the CDC no-eviction order set to end Dec. 31, it’s not just housing at stake for millions of Americans who rent and are already at greater risk of lacking complete plumbing — it’s the ability for people to wash their hands at home during a pandemic. The eviction moratorium applies to people renting apartments and houses, and to mobile home owners who lease the land on which they live.

“Eviction is the first phase in a cycle of household insecurity, which we know relates to food insecurity, water insecurity, job insecurity, health insecurity,” says University of Colorado Denver sociologist Esther Sullivan, who wasn’t part of the PNAS paper but has studied mobile home evictions for nearly a decade. “The best thing we can do is not let that cycle start — to invest up front to keep people in their homes.”

The authors of the PNAS paper note that the Census Bureau often undercounts renters, people without homes and people of color, “demographics that are disproportionately plumbing poor.” The Census Bureau has acknowledged that those groups are undercounted. Given census undercounting, the authors explain the actual number of people in the U.S. that lack complete plumbing is likely closer to 2 million — roughly the size of the Kansas City metro area, for comparison.

“There’s percentages and then there’s numbers,” says Manny Teodoro, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied water affordability, but was not part of the PNAS paper and hasn’t reviewed its methodology. “Even if it’s a tiny percentage, a million or two [million] people is a lot of people — and it should be unacceptable to us.”

Meehan and her co-authors focus on urban and suburban households that lack complete plumbing despite being “close to networked supply.” But their research has implications for rural households, too.

The type of structure people live in matters when it comes to access to running water. Mobile homes make up 2.6% of households in the 50 largest metros but represent 5.2% of households that don’t have complete plumbing, according to the PNAS paper. Mobile home households are 89% more likely to lack piped water compared with other types of homes, the authors find. While metro areas are often associated with cities and suburbs, they can include rural areas where mobile homes are more commonly found.

“Within a metropolitan area, there absolutely will be many mobile home parks,” says Sullivan. “It’s useful to think about the top 50 metropolitan areas. That’s big metros, small metros. That’s good because that will capture many, many types of places.”

For example, the Houston metro area, as Sullivan points out, is comprised of nine counties, several of which are rural in part.

Burdensome costs

Even for households that have complete plumbing, the cost of water can be a significant financial drain. Roughly one-third of households in the largest 50 metro areas are “cost-burdened,” meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs, according to the PNAS paper. The authors find almost half of households without complete plumbing are cost-burdened. The median household income across the top 50 metro areas is about $65,000, compared with a median income of about $33,000 for households in those areas that lack complete plumbing, according to the authors.

The cost of water can be a significant financial drain.

In his April 2020 paper, “Water and Sewer Affordability in the United States,” Teodoro estimates that monthly water and sewer bills eat up a substantial portion of low-income families’ disposable income. Households that are among the lowest fifth percentile of income earners use on average 12.4% of their disposable monthly income — equivalent to 10 hours of work at local minimum wages — to pay their water and sewer bills. The estimate is based on a sample of nearly 400 utilities — about three-quarters of them public and one-quarter private — serving populations ranging from 3,300 people to more than 100,000.

“What we’re trying to capture is the tradeoffs customers have to make to pay for their water and sewer bill,” Teodoro says. “The minimum wage metric is nice because it’s immediately intuitive and it provides a sense of the opportunity costs of paying water and sewer bills.”

One big idea Teodoro proposes to address water affordability in the U.S. is to consolidate water utilities. Large water systems tend to deliver higher quality water more efficiently to customers, he says. Teodoro estimates there are 30,000 to 40,000 organizations running some 50,000 water systems across the country. Some municipalities share water delivery responsibilities while others operate their own water organizations.

“To give you a sense of how much complexity that introduces, there are about 1,200 electrical utilities in the U.S. and you’ll hear the electric folks bemoan how complex their governance is,” he says. “We’re talking about an order of magnitude larger for water.”

Teodoro has proposed several other solutions, including regulatory reform and technology upgrades. But consolidation is the first step toward facilitating the rest, he says. There has been some recent progress at the federal level. In an Oct. 13 executive order, President Donald Trump laid out a range of directives aimed at improving water resource management, including the consolidation of federal water-related task forces, working groups and cross-agency initiatives.

“Water at the federal level is managed through several different agencies, which creates a lot of confusion, and sometimes these agencies work at cross purposes,” Teodoro says. “You might have the [Environmental Protection Agency] wanting utilities to consolidate but the [Department of Agriculture] has a rural development program to assist small systems. But that could also be seen as something like life support for systems that maybe ought to be consolidated.”

From unpaid bills to home loss

It’s difficult to assess the number of people in the U.S. who have trouble paying their water bills because “water bills themselves are such a local issue,” says Coty Montag, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who wrote “Lien In: Challenging Municipalities’ Discriminatory Water Practices Under the Fair Housing Act,” published in July 2020 in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.

No-eviction orders are helping renters maintain hand hygiene.

The average monthly cost of water for a family of four buying water from one of the 30 largest water systems in the U.S. has increased 64% in the past decade, from $44.39 in 2010 to $72.93 in 2019, according to reporting from Circle of Blue, a nonprofit journalism and research outlet that covers water access and affordability. Those figures are a small snapshot of the water systems in the U.S. and capture systems “which typically display better financial strength, greater economies of scale, and fewer health violations than their smaller counterparts,” writes senior reporter Brett Walton.

When residents cannot pay their water bills, they can face serious repercussions and even lose their homes. An unpaid water bill of just a few hundred dollars can lead to home loss in certain municipalities — even if a homeowner has paid off their mortgage.

Take an unpaid bill of $300 in Cleveland, for example, where there is “no statutory minimum to initiate this process,” Montag says. “You could have a very low unpaid bill and end up in this process.”

If a Cleveland homeowner can’t pay off a $300 bill, the city can place a lien on their property. A lien is a legal claim on an asset, such as real estate. The person or entity owning or “holding” the lien can take over the property if the debt remains unpaid. The lien certificate holder — the City of Cleveland in this example — can sell the lien to another entity, such as a bank. If the debt remains unpaid, the lienholder can initiate foreclosure, eventually leading a homeowner who otherwise legally owns the property into eviction.

In her 2019 report “Water/Color: A Study of Race and the Water Affordability Crisis in America’s Cities,” Montag documents legislation in every state that allows municipalities to place property liens for unpaid utility bills, though “not all states actually do this process,” she says.

Some cities have taken steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to ease the utility bill burden for their residents. “We began to suspend water payments to make it easier for people to have money in their pocket,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said during a Nov. 19 briefing hosted by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Ohio State Sen. Sandra Williams in March 2020 proposed legislation that would ban liens for unpaid water bills. “It’s hard to believe that this could be a condition in Ohio in how we relate to our local governments and services providers,” Ohio State Sen. Tim Schaffer said when Williams proposed the bill, according to reporting from News 5 Cleveland. The legislation remains under consideration in the Ohio Senate’s Ways and Means Committee, which reviews tax policy bills.

The Baltimore General Assembly in March 2019 passed legislation banning property liens over water debt. In December 2019, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed suit against the city of Cleveland, alleging liens there have a discriminatory racial impact, with three times as many water liens placed in majority Black neighborhoods compared with white neighborhoods in certain years, Montag says. The suit is ongoing in U.S. district court in northern Ohio.

“Water affordability has become a really important issue demonstrating systemic racial discrimination,” she says. “Back in the 1960s, my organization litigated a case about Black access to water in sewer systems. We’re seeing these same issues that existed more than 50 years ago still exist today.”

Another city known for issuing liens for unpaid water bills? Flint, Michigan.

‘That’s really disturbing’

Flint attracted national media attention in 2014 and 2015 after the city switched its water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Scientists linked bacteria in the river water to an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease and found dangerously high lead levels after corrosive river water ate into old pipes, as Kettering University political scientist Ben Pauli recalls in “The Flint Water Crisis,” published in March 2020 in WIREs Water.

The city started supplying residents with water from the Flint River while a new pipeline to Lake Huron was built. The Flint water treatment plant wasn’t ready for the switch and its staff didn’t know how to properly treat river water, according to Pauli. Residents subsequently suffered hair loss and rashes, and researchers documented elevated levels of lead and other metals in city water.

Nearly every resident of Flint was exposed to lead, according to the CDC. In the years since, journalists have shown how children in Flint exposed to lead suffered health problems and had trouble learning in school.

“Despite Flint’s water quality issues, its water rates rank among the highest in the United States and residents have faced the threat of water shutoffs and property tax liens for nonpayment of water bills,” Pauli writes.

As filmmaker Kwesi Reynolds documents in a 2017 photo essay in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, people in Flint washed their hands using canned water during the height of the crisis.

“Now all of a sudden there’s water distribution centers,” says Reynolds, who was born in Detroit and raised in Flint before moving to Dallas in 2019 for work. “You look at it now, that’s really disturbing. Five years ago in my city, you had to go get bottled water because you could not drink the water from your tap.”

Reynolds’ father, Lawrence Reynolds, a longtime pediatrician in Flint, was a member of the Flint Water Advisory Task Force, which, in 2016, provided recommendations for then-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to address the crisis. Since then, the city has replaced more than 9,500 pipes. Flint Mayor Sheldon Neeley has said that lead water service lines in the city would be replaced by Nov. 30. The city has completed nearly all of its home inspections, with about 2,500 households remaining as of August.

“You assume the basic amenities will be taken care of,” Reynolds says. “Water, I think, should be something that everybody should have access to. Water is not a civil right — it should be a human right.”

For more on water access, affordability and safety check out racial disparities in access to running water: 5 studies to know and lead in drinking water: key facts and reporting tips. Plus, five tips for investigating stories on water access, affordability and safety.

The post Water, but not everywhere: Research sheds light on race and water access in metro areas appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Clean water piped into the home is a given for most Americans. But piped, running water isn’t universal, and people of color are disproportionately more likely than white Americans to lack piped water, finds new research in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Householders of color in the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. are 34% more likely to lack piped water compared with white, non-Hispanic householders, the researchers find. In all, the authors estimate 1.1 million people in the U.S. lack what the U.S. Census Bureau calls “complete plumbing” with nearly three-quarters of them living in cities and suburbs.

The Census Bureau considers a household to have complete plumbing if it has running hot and cold water with a bathtub or shower used only by people living in the dwelling. People without a piped connection to water may still be able to access clean water by purchasing purified water from a store or retrieving water from other sources, such as a stream.

“It is hard for many people to imagine that communities in the modern-day U.S. lack such a basic life necessity, but for those of us who work at the crux of infrastructure provision and social and spatial inequality, this story — the story of systemic inequality — is an old story,” lead author Katie Meehan, a senior lecturer in human geography at King’s College London, told Journalist’s Resource by email.

The authors further find that renters are 61% more likely to lack complete plumbing compared with those who own their homes. They note that the Census Bureau often undercounts renters, people without homes and people of color, “demographics that are disproportionately plumbing poor.”

The Census Bureau has acknowledged that those groups are undercounted. Given census undercounting, the authors estimate the real number of people in the U.S. that lack complete plumbing is likely closer to 2 million — roughly the size of the Kansas City metro area, for comparison.

On Sept. 4 the Centers for Disease Control and Protection put into effect a moratorium on evictions because “housing stability helps protect public health because homelessness increases the likelihood of individuals moving into congregate settings, such as homeless shelters, which then puts individuals at higher risk to COVID-19,” the agency wrote in its order.

The American Medical Association in a recent legal brief explained the eviction moratorium is helping renters maintain physical distancing, self-quarantining and hand hygiene. With the CDC eviction moratorium set to end Dec. 31, it’s not just housing at stake for millions of Americans who rent and are already at greater risk of lacking complete plumbing — it’s the ability for people to wash their hands at home during a pandemic.

Read on to learn more about the new PNAS paper, plus four other academic studies to help journalists better understand links between race and access to indoor running water.

—

Geographies of Insecure Water Access and the Housing-Water Nexus in U.S. Cities
Katie Meehan, Jason R. Jurjevich, Nicholas Chun and Justin Sherrill. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, November 2020.

The authors analyze Census Bureau survey data covering 2013 to 2017 and estimate that more than 1 million people in the U.S. lack complete plumbing in their homes.

Householders of color in the 50 largest metro areas are 34% more likely to lack complete plumbing compared with white, non-Hispanic households, the authors find. Householders of color make up about 39% of households in those areas, but represent 53% of households that lack complete plumbing, they find.

Metro areas with the highest percentages of households lacking complete plumbing include: San Francisco; Portland; Milwaukee; San Antonio; Austin; Cleveland; Los Angeles; Memphis; New Orleans; and New York. Metro areas generally encompass core cities and their surrounding suburbs.

The authors note that the Census Bureau often undercounts renters, people without homes and people of color, “demographics that are disproportionately plumbing poor.” The Census Bureau has acknowledged that those groups are undercounted. The authors note that, given undercounts, the actual number of people in the U.S. who lack complete plumbing is likely closer to 2 million.

“Without universal water access, efforts to limit the spread of infectious diseases — such as COVID-19 — will undermine global health and benefit certain populations over others,” the authors write.

Exposing the Myths of Household Water Insecurity in the Global North: A Critical Review
Katie Meehan, et. al. WIREs Water, October 2020.

The authors dispel the myth of “modern water,” the idea that water access is universal and secure in high-income countries.

“Recent research suggests that household water access is far from universal in high‐income countries,” they write. Based on their research review on gaps in universal water access in high-income countries they identify four contributing factors.

The first is the complicated nature of water systems in the U.S., where there are tens of thousands of public and private organizations that distribute water. Smaller systems are more likely to fall short in providing water to all households in their areas, the authors write. They note that some areas, notably in some Black communities in North Carolina, racial groups were historically and systematically excluded from political control over water access.

The second factor has to do with precarious housing driven by wealth gaps among racial groups. Simply put, people with unconventional housing arrangements are more likely to lack indoor water. The third contributing factor is citizenship status and the fourth has to do with “institutionalized structures of marginalization,” such as the forced displacement of Indigenous people.

The authors go on to explore several other myths having to do with water in high-income countries, including the myth that water is always clean, safe and affordable.

“Myths are more than a collection of misleading statistics or gaps in understanding: as shared beliefs, myths create and sustain norms and perceptions of secure water, including whose water experiences are deemed hegemonic or universal, and whose experiences are made invisible,” the authors write.

Plumbing Poverty: Mapping Hot Spots of Racial and Geographic Inequality in U.S. Household Water Insecurity
Shiloh Deitz and Katie Meehan. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, March 2019.

The authors introduce the idea of “plumbing poverty” as a way to understand water insecurity in the U.S. Analyzing a trove of census data, they identify hot spots for plumbing poverty, where households lack complete plumbing at rates higher than average.

After adjusting for income, housing type and other factors, the authors find householders who are American Indians are 3.7 times more likely to lack complete plumbing compared with householders who don’t identify as American Indian. Black and Hispanic households are also more likely to be plumbing poor than white, non-Hispanic households, they find.

Geographic hotspots include communities in Alaska, the Four Corners region of the Southwest and along the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the upper Midwest, the Northeast — particularly northern Maine and New Hampshire — the Allegheny region in Pennsylvania and Appalachia in West Virginia.

“Plumbing poverty is not a simple artifact of income, rurality, or housing type; infrastructure provision is clearly racialized and historically produced in the United States,” the authors conclude.

The Drinking Water Disparities Framework: On the Origins and Persistence of Inequities in Exposure
Carolina Balazs and Isha Ray. American Journal of Public Health, April 2014.

The authors spent five years — 2005 to 2010 — interviewing residents and water regulators in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Groundwater pumped from wells in the valley has been chronically laden with arsenic, a carcinogen, above acceptable levels set by the World Health Organization.

The authors identify examples of local water policies designed to “explicitly deprive communities of adequate drinking water resources.” The 1973 Tulare County General Plan, for example, says that so-called “non-viable communities would, as a consequence of withholding major public facilities such as sewer and water systems, enter a process of long term, natural decline as residents depart for improved opportunities in nearby communities.”

“These decisions, in conjunction with regulatory failures, a lack of community resources to mitigate contamination, and political disenfranchisement of local residents, help explain the origins of environmental injustice in the context of drinking water,” the authors conclude.

Racial Disparities in Access to Community Water Supply Service in Wake County, North Carolina
Jacqueline MacDonald Gibson, Nicholas DeFelice, Daniel Sebastian and Hannah Leker. American Journal of Public Health, December 2014.

The authors perform the first statistical analysis of how historically Black communities in North Carolina have been systematically denied municipal drinking water. Using property tax and census data for Wake County, the most populated county in the state, they find that every 10% increase in the Black population within a census block increases by about 4% the chance that people will lack municipal water service.

The authors point to a “legacy of racial segregation,” in which cities in North Carolina are allowed planning and development powers in “extra-territorial jurisdictions” up to three miles beyond city boundaries. Black communities were often excluded from cities but included in extra-territorial jurisdictions “over which majority white town councils retained control — a practice known as ‘racial underbounding,’” they write.

“This research reveals a disparity in the physical environment — access to treated municipal drinking water — that potentially could contribute to observed racial disparities in health in Wake County,” the authors conclude.

For more on water safety issues, check out lead in drinking water: key facts and reporting tips. Plus, research on race and water access in metro areas and five tips for investigating stories on water access, affordability and safety.

The post Racial disparities in access to running water: 5 studies to know appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan changed its water supply, switching from Lake Huron water piped in from Detroit to its own Flint River. The river water wasn’t properly treated, and so it corroded the city’s lead pipes, carrying the toxic metal through the community’s faucets. Thousands of children were poisoned, and twelve people died of Legionnaires’ disease, which may have been connected to the change in water supply.

Anna Clark was working as a journalist in Detroit as the water crisis in Flint came to a head in 2015. She began covering the story that fall and wrote a book about the crisis, “The Poisoned City,” published in 2018. It’s a story about water, but it’s also a story about infrastructure, disinvestment from American cities, the crisis in local news and racial inequality.

“It’s a very rich place to be, to be reporting from this intersection of built environment, natural environment and human well-being. I think it’s pretty powerful,” Clark said in a recent phone call with Journalist’s Resource.

The story is rich because it crosses beats, but it’s also complicated because of this, and complicated in its own right.

“It’s in some ways a technically challenging story,” Clark said. “Reporting on this myself, there was a lot I had to learn about the safe drinking water law, how water testing works, what corrosion control is, the different wording for parts of a drinking water system.”

“It can be harder to enter into something like that, especially at a time when people are telling you contradictory information. So you’re trying to catch up on material that is probably new to you, and you’re being told different things by different people, which makes it even more obfuscating.”

For reporters new to the topic, Clark cleared up some common misconceptions about lead in drinking water.

What to know: Even when water passes lead testing standards, it might not be safe to drink.

Reporting tips: “There’s a lot of questions reporters should ask about that. One is questioning how that water is sampled and how many samples they actually collected. Communities as large as Chicago can get by on 50 samples every three years. Completely weird, and yet legal. Still they’re able to declare that according to what we did we’re ‘safe,’” Clark said, referencing the fact that Illinois EPA regulations require Chicago’s water management department to test only 50 sites for contamination city-wide every three years  in a metropolis that serves over 5 million residents.

She added that the Lead and Copper Rule – a federal regulation that sets national limits for the concentrations of these metals in public drinking water – has a loophole that should spark reporters’ scrutiny. According to the rule, while 90 percent of a community’s water samples must have less than 15 parts per billion of lead, 10 percent can have any amount of lead in them. (Clark noted that this rule doesn’t apply if there are stricter state standards in place, though this is rare.)

“Declaring that the water meets all federal regulations doesn’t mean that any individual home is safe,” she said. “It also doesn’t necessarily account for testing in multifamily housing, or schools, or childcare centers.”

Only seven states — California, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Virginia — and the District of Columbia require testing in schools (the requirements as to which types of schools — e.g., public, private, charters — must be tested vary by state). This is in spite of the fact that children are most affected by lead exposure, and schools are often older buildings in need of lead service line replacements, according to Clark.

Looking beyond schools, Clark recommended investigating lead levels everywhere people live, including hospitals, jails, prisons, juvenile detention centers and immigrant detention centers.

She also recommended reporters look at lead exposure issues in rural areas. “Cities have gotten a lot of attention, but rural areas, in some ways, they have completely different rules,” Clark said. “Often they don’t have requirements to test and add corrosion control to water at all, even though they also have very old pipes. Often the samples are only required to be tested very rarely. I think that puts people at risk.”

What to know: Positive test results for lead don’t necessarily mean that an entire community is drinking tainted water.

“Getting one sample from one place that shows an outrageous amount of lead doesn’t necessarily mean everybody in the entire community is drinking toxic water,” she said. “The way lead works — and this is why it is challenging — is that it can be erratic. Its release can be very erratic. And this is one reason why I would love to see more consistent, more controlled water testing requirements, both at the state level and at the federal level.”

What to know: The methods used to test water can have drastic impacts on the results.

For example, in Flint, residents were instructed to flush their pipes for five minutes before collecting a sample, which Clark said can result in lower-than-usual lead levels.

Reporting tips: Clark recommended reporters ask for a copy of the instructions issued to the community for collecting water samples.

Digging into the results, too, can be revelatory. Clark suggested mapping the results of the tests with an eye toward the age of the homes and communities that provided the samples. 1986 is the key year to keep in mind, she said, because that’s when Congress enacted the Safe Water Drinking Act Amendments of 1986, which banned the use of lead pipes. Also, Clark suggested checking whose homes are being tested. The Chicago Tribune discovered that in Chicago, many of the homes where water was sampled for lead testing between 2010 and 2013 belonged to current or former employees of the water department.

Clark also noted that reporters should keep in mind that EPA guidelines recommend testing in areas that are most likely to have lead problems. “A lot of people aren’t doing this, and there really hasn’t been a lot of pushback when they haven’t,” she said.

Additionally, areas with elevated water lead levels are supposed to be re-tested in the next round of required testing. Is this happening? Clark suggested reporters ask.

Reporters who have the resources to do so might consider doing their own independent testing – with guidance from a scientist with expertise in the subject, Clark said.

What to know: Lead exposure has cumulative effects, especially in children.

“We don’t exist in silos, so we might be exposed to lead through water. We might also be exposed to lead through paint and through soil.”

Reporting tip: “Urban reporting and environmental reporting are often the same thing,” she added in a follow-up email. “Cities are ecosystems. It would be great to see people on those beats do more co-reporting, and for reporters who specialize in each to have some training and experience in the other. That could be a way to tell better, truer stories.”

What to know: Though low levels of lead in the blood might be common, they are not natural (normal) or safe.

Clark cited the pioneering work of scientist Clair Patterson, who stressed the importance of not mistaking what is common for what is safe with respect to blood lead levels. “People would say the amount of lead in this child’s body is no different than all these children’s bodies, and he was kind of making the case that just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s normal,” Clark said. “His research was all about how much lead have humans put into the environment and created exposure opportunities.”

What to know: It’s not enough to say lead contamination in one community is “better” or “worse” than it is in another.

“I see a lot of people … use the phrase ‘worse than Flint’ — they use Flint as a comparison point,” she said. “I get what reporters are trying to do, they’re trying to provide context to their readers, they’re trying to relate whatever lead issue’s going on in their community with a story that their readers might be familiar with. But … I’d just be a little careful of that, because comparisons like that can be slippery. What’s ‘worse’? What does that mean?”

What to know: It’s important to pinpoint the sources of lead contamination.

Though many American communities were built with lead plumbing infrastructure, Clark said less is known about the specific locations of these pipes. This makes it difficult to understand the risk posed to the community and take action to replace the plumbing.

Clark suggested this is a key thread for journalists to follow. Try mapping the lead plumbing in your community. It’s an important consumer story, Clark said, as well as a story that might motivate public policy action – i.e., replacing lead-based infrastructure.

What to know: Regulatory bodies might not have the funding or capacity to monitor the quality of drinking water. And lead prevention programs don’t always address lead in drinking water – they often focus on lead paint.

“In Michigan, our Department of Environmental Quality had been defunded for years,” she said. “They lost a lot of staffing and resources, and yet had a huge number of increasingly complex regulatory responsibilities.”

Reporting tip: Clark recommended that journalists report on the people who have regulatory oversight: “Look at the people who have the responsibility for regulating this. Are they resourced enough to do it well? What are their priorities? Is their environmental department truly acting for the public good or are they acting more as business boosters and so on?”

Ask how lead prevention programs measure their success. And find out what resources they offer for health recovery, education and support?

What to know: Though there’s plenty of work to be done, not all stories about lead are stories of despair.

Reporting tip: “I’d love to see reporters covering people who are trying to do things right,” Clark said. “Whether that’s community activists or public officials or people who are creating blueprints for safer and healthier communities and inclusive communities — recognizing that infrastructure can repeat the inequalities and injustices of our past in a very literal way, or it can work for the opposite.”

A clear opportunity for a solutions story, Clark said, is highlighting why and how communities have gotten rid of their lead-based infrastructure.

What to know: It’s wrong to frame lead stories with a pat hero/victim narrative.

“It’s not accurate to tell a story, at least in Flint, where the community was poor and victimized and restless and unruly and suddenly these outsiders came in and saved them,” she said.

“I think that also can be dangerously misleading for other communities, who might have otherwise had much to learn from a lot of the really extraordinary community organizing tactics that happened in Flint.”

Reporting tips: Tell the stories of the people who contributed to lead mitigation efforts, but put them in context.

“Remember that when you’re writing about communities, it’s never about one person. … I think it’s also worth interrogating a little bit about who we see as heroes and who we don’t see as heroes. … I think what’s frustrating about Flint is this is a community that had been dismissed for so long. Everything they’d been saying, the questions they had, the independent research they were doing that was totally valid. And as journalists we risk repeating those very same mistakes in the narrative we tell.”

She pointed out the racial dynamic at play here, too. She cited the example of Flint, where activists began getting attention after putting forward white, married mothers as spokespeople for the cause.

Clark also noted that diverse sourcing helps to build community trust and results in a broader range of story leads.

What to know: Lead service lines aren’t entirely public utilities.

“One of the big issues in a lot of communities is that homeowners are expected to be responsible for the part of the line that’s under their property, while the city or county or whoever is responsible for [the] other half,” she said. “This has presented a lot of challenges for people who are trying to find ways to fund replacing them.”

What to know: Partial line replacements – where a portion of lead plumbing, rather than the entire system, is replaced — aren’t a feasible strategy for lead mitigation. They actually increase contamination.

“Partial line replacements are scientifically found to cause a surge in lead, because you’re shaking up the pipe and the part of the lead pipe that remains will kind of push out more of this toxin into your tap water,” she explained.

Reporting tip: Clark recommended posing tough questions to people who advocate for partial line replacements and citing research that counters notions that this strategy works to mitigate lead exposure.

What to know: Lead isn’t the only water issue worth looking at.

“One of the other big issues in Flint was, of course, the Legionnaires’ outbreak,” she said. “I think bringing more light to that story… would be very interesting. … Legionnaires’ disease as an environmental risk that’s connected with water.”

For more research on lead, we’ve gathered scholarship on lead poisoning. We’ve also written about airplanes as a source of lead pollution and connections between early lead exposure and behavioral problems in teens.

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Legislation like the Clean Water Act has helped check the effluent flowing into rivers and streams. Though that fight is far from over, a new, all-too-modern danger has meanwhile seeped invisibly into waters around the world: legal and illegal drugs. And their effect on the ecosystem is poorly understood.

The United States is a heavily medicated country. Almost 70 percent of Americans took at least one prescription drug regularly in 2013, up from 44 percent in 2000, according to a Mayo Clinic study. Illicit drugs are common, too. Antidepressants and narcotics, hormones and amphetamines — we take these tonics in quantities unlike ever before.

They don’t disappear after entering our bodies. What we don’t metabolize we excrete through our urine and feces. Neither sewer-treatment systems nor drinking-water plants filter all these compounds from the water.

Scientists have found Prozac, speed and antibiotic-resistant sludge in the food chain. They have discovered higher-than-normal levels of cocaine in waterways after holidays and events like the Super Bowl. Many farmers treat their animals with antibiotics and hormones, which also enter rivers, lakes and reservoirs. And don’t forget non-prescription personal care products like sunscreen that wash off our bodies into the sewers.

Researchers are just beginning to query the dangers these contaminants may pose.

How are humans, for example, affected by eating fish on Prozac? In rivers in Colorado and Iowa, researchers have found Prozac and other antidepressants in the brain tissue of mullet, which is eaten by humans and other fish (such as walleye, trout and bass) that humans later consume. Other researchers have found that minnows exposed to antidepressants exhibit developmental delays.

Downstream from Baltimore — besides the morphine, caffeine and acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) in the water — amphetamines (speed) seem to be encouraging an increase in aquatic insects (dipterans, such as lake flies and gnats) by 65 and 89 percent. In other words, the bugs are on speed and they’re mating like crazy.

Other researchers are concerned about the places that antibiotics — drugs like penicillin that kill bacteria like strep throat — are appearing. A 2016 study in Nature Microbiology noted the presence of dozens of antibiotic-resistant genes in bacteria along thousands of miles of the Chinese coast. Bacteria that have evolved protections against antibiotics could, in theory, cause an epidemic in livestock or humans. A 2007 study found such adapted bacteria widespread at Brazilian beaches, too. Scholars looking at India’s waters found antibiotic concentrations up to 40 times higher than in the West.

Still other scientists note that the hormone gestodene, which some women take as a contraceptive, appears to frustrate minnow reproduction by making the female fish behave more like males and the males less interested in breeding.

Listed below are some of the leading research papers on drugs in the water. In early 2017, the U.S. Geological Survey — the office of the Department of Interior tasked with scientific research — also released an eight-part study on “contaminants of emerging concern” in the water. The Survey defines CECs broadly as “any synthetic or naturally occurring chemical or any microorganism that is not commonly monitored in the environment but has the potential to enter the environment and cause known or suspected adverse ecological and/or human health effects. In some cases, release of emerging chemical or microbial contaminants to the environment has likely occurred for a long time, but may not have been recognized until new detection methods were developed. In other cases, synthesis of new chemicals or changes in use and disposal of existing chemicals can create new sources of emerging contaminants.”

Selected research:

“Continental-Scale Pollution of Estuaries with Antibiotic Resistance Genes.”
 Zhu, Yong-Guan; et al. Nature Microbiology, 2017. DOI: 10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.270.
Abstract: “Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) have moved from the environmental resistome into human commensals and pathogens, driven by human selection with antimicrobial agents. These genes have increased in abundance in humans and domestic animals, to become common components of waste streams. Estuarine habitats lie between terrestrial/freshwater and marine ecosystems, acting as natural filtering points for pollutants. Here, we have profiled ARGs in sediments from 18 estuaries over 4,000 km of coastal China using high-throughput quantitative polymerase chain reaction, and investigated their relationship with bacterial communities, antibiotic residues and socio-economic factors. ARGs in estuarine sediments were diverse and abundant, with over 200 different resistance genes being detected, 18 of which were found in all 90 sediment samples. The strong correlations of identified resistance genes with known mobile elements, network analyses and partial redundancy analysis all led to the conclusion that human activity is responsible for the abundance and dissemination of these ARGs. […]”

“Exposure to the Contraceptive Progestin, Gestodene, Alters Reproductive Behavior, Arrests Egg Deposition, and Masculinizes Development in the Fathead Minnow (Pimephales promelas)”
Frankel, Tyler E.; et al. Environmental Science and Technology, 2016. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b00799.
Abstract: “Endogenous progestogens and pharmaceutical progestins enter the environment through wastewater treatment plant effluent and agricultural field runoff. Lab studies demonstrate strong, negative exposure effects of these chemicals on aquatic vertebrate reproduction. Behavior can be a sensitive, early indicator of exposure to environmental contaminants associated with altered reproduction yet is rarely examined in ecotoxicology studies. Gestodene is a human contraceptive progestin and a potent activator of fish androgen receptors. Our objective was to test the effects of gestodene on reproductive behavior and associated egg deposition in the fathead minnow. After only 1 day, males exposed to ng/L of gestodene were more aggressive and less interested in courtship and mating, and exposed females displayed less female courtship behavior. Interestingly, 25 percent of the gestodene tanks contained a female that drove the male out of the breeding tile and displayed male-typical courtship behaviors toward the other female. […]  the rapid and profound alterations of the reproductive biology of gestodene-exposed fish suggest that wild populations could be similarly affected.”

“A Review of the Occurrence of Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in Indian Water Bodies.”
Balakrishna, Keshava; et al. Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, 2017. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoenv.2016.11.014.
Abstract: “Little information exists on the occurrence and the ultimate fate of pharmaceuticals in the water bodies in India despite being one of the world leaders in pharmaceutical production and consumption. This paper has reviewed 19 published reports of pharmaceutical occurrence in the aquatic environment in India [conventional activated sludge wastewater treatment plants (WTPs), hospital WTPs, rivers, and groundwater]. Carbamazepine (antipsychoactive), atenolol (antihypertensive), triclocarban and triclosan (antimicrobials), trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole (antibacterials), ibuprofen and acetaminophen (analgesics), and caffeine (stimulant) are the most commonly detected at higher concentrations in Indian WTPs that treat predominantly the domestic sewage. The concentration of ciprofloxacin, sulfamethoxazole, amoxicillin, norfloxacin, and ofloxacin in Indian WTPs were up to 40 times higher than that in other countries in Europe, Australia, Asia, and North America. […]”

“Antimicrobial Resistance and Species Composition of Enterococcus Species Isolated from Waters and Sands of Marine Recreational Beaches in Southeastern Brazil.”
Fernandes Cardoso de Oliveira, Ana Julia; Watanabe Pinhata, Juliana Maira. Water Research, 2008. DOI: 10.1016/j.watres.2007.12.002.
Abstract: “Density, species composition and antimicrobial resistance in bacteria of the Enterococcus genus were evaluated in seawater and sands from two marine recreational beaches with different levels of pollution. […] These results show that water and sands from beaches with high indexes of fecal contamination of human origin may be potential sources of contamination by pathogens and contribute to the dissemination of bacterial resistance.”

“Occurrence and Potential Biological Effects of Amphetamine on Stream Communities.”
Lee, Sylvia S.; et al. Environmental Science and Technology, 2016. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b03717.
Abstract: “The presence of pharmaceuticals, including illicit drugs in aquatic systems, is a topic of environmental significance because of their global occurrence and potential effects on aquatic ecosystems and human health, but few studies have examined the ecological effects of illicit drugs. We conducted a survey of several drug residues, including the potentially illicit drug amphetamine, at 6 stream sites along an urban to rural gradient in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. We detected numerous drugs, including amphetamine (3 to 630 ng L-1), in all stream sites. We examined the fate and ecological effects of amphetamine on biofilm, seston, and aquatic insect communities in artificial streams exposed to an environmentally relevant concentration (1 μg L-1) of amphetamine. […] Exposing streams to amphetamine also changed the composition of bacterial and diatom communities in biofilms at day 21 and increased cumulative dipteran emergence by 65 percent and 89 percent during the first and third weeks of the experiment, respectively. This study demonstrates that amphetamine and other biologically active drugs are present in urban streams and have the potential to affect both structure and function of stream communities.”

“Antidepressant Pharmaceuticals in Two U.S. Effluent-Impacted Streams: Occurrence and Fate in Water and Sediment, and Selective Uptake in Fish Neural Tissue.”
Schultz, Melissa M.; et al. Environmental Science and Technology, 2010. DOI: 10.1021/es9022706.
Abstract: “Antidepressant pharmaceuticals are widely prescribed in the United States; release of municipal wastewater effluent is a primary route introducing them to aquatic environments, where little is known about their distribution and fate. Water, bed sediment, and brain tissue from native white suckers (Catostomus commersoni) were collected upstream and at points progressively downstream from outfalls discharging to two effluent-impacted streams, Boulder Creek (Colorado) and Fourmile Creek (Iowa). […] This study documents that wastewater effluent can be a point source of antidepressants to stream ecosystems and that the qualitative composition of antidepressants in brain tissue from exposed fish differs substantially from the compositions observed in stream water and sediment, suggesting selective uptake.”

“Temporal Variability of Pharmaceuticals and Illicit Drugs in Wastewater and the Effects of a Major Sporting Event.”
Gerrity, Daniel; et al. Water Research, 2011. DOI: 10.1016/j.watres.2011.07.020.
Abstract: “This study characterizes the temporal variability associated with a major sporting event using flow data and corresponding mass loadings of a suite of prescription pharmaceuticals, potential endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs), and illicit drugs. Wastewater influent and finished effluent samples were collected during the National Football League’s Super Bowl, which is a significant weekend for tourism in the study area. Data from a baseline weekend is also provided to illustrate flows and TOrC loadings during “normal” operational conditions. Some compounds exhibited interesting temporal variations (e.g., atenolol), and several compounds demonstrated different loading profiles during the Super Bowl and baseline weekends (e.g., the primary cocaine metabolite benzoylecgonine). Interestingly, the influent mass loadings of prescription pharmaceuticals were generally similar in magnitude to those of the illicit drugs and their metabolites. However, conventional wastewater treatment was more effective in removing the illicit drugs and their metabolites.”

“Antidepressants in Stream Ecosystems: Influence of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) on Algal Production and Insect Emergence.”
Richmond, E. K.; et al. Freshwater Science, 2016. DOI: 10.1086/687841.
Abstract: “The effects of pharmaceuticals on aquatic ecosystems are the subject of increasing environmental concern. Of particular interest are a suite of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), commonly prescribed to treat depression. SSRIs are now detected in the environment worldwide, but their effects on ecosystems are not well understood. We conducted replicated experiments testing for an ecosystem effect of SSRIs in streams. We used artificial stream mesocosms to expose natural biofilms and aquatic insect communities to concentrations (20 µg/L) of fluoxetine or citalopram or a mix of both (totaling 40 µg/L). […] Total biomass of emerged adults at day 14 was greater in the SSRI-exposed streams, suggesting that fluoxetine and citalopram may influence developmental processes in some stream insects. Ecosystem function and invertebrate population dynamics are sensitive to pharmaceuticals. Our study demonstrates that chronic exposure to fluoxetine and citalopram has the potential to affect aquatic biota and ecosystem function.”

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Environmental groups have been trying since 2007 to force the federal government to ban the common insecticide chlorpyrifos, which extensive research has shown can harm the developing brains of fetuses and children who eat food from plants treated with the compound. In the last few years of the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency had moved toward prohibition. But in March 2017, the EPA’s new director tabled discussions of any ban, shocking environmental and patient advocacy groups, but relieving farmers who depend on chlorpyrifos to protect their crops. The Natural Resources Defense Council, among others, have petitioned a federal court to force a ban.

Much of the EPA’s own research outlines chlorpyrifos’s adverse health effects. In 2016 the EPA reported “sufficient evidence” that low levels affect brain development and concluded that some American 1- to 2-year-old children are receiving up to 140 times what are considered safe levels in their food. The EPA has also reported elevated levels in water supplies and established that the compound adversely affects 1,778 out of 1,835 studied species of wild animals.

Chlorpyrifos, a type of insecticide known as an “organophosphate,” was first marketed in 1965 and was banned for most residential uses in 2000. Today, it is widely used on corn, soybeans, fruit and nut trees, Brussels sprouts, cranberries, broccoli and cauliflower, among many other foods. It is also used on golf courses, to protect utility poles and fence posts, and to kill mosquitoes, cockroaches and ants.

Dow Chemical markets chlorpyrifos under the name Lorsban and argues that the science is inconclusive.

Farmers are alarmed at attempts to ban the insecticide. It is a “critical tool,” a farmer in Oregon wrote on a federal website that collected comments in late 2016 as the Obama administration was weighing a ban. “Taking an important product like chlorpyrifos off the market would leave Oregon farmers, like me, more vulnerable to pests,” the grower wrote, adding that critics of chlorpyrifos often misstate how it is used.

The available science on chlorpyrifos can be difficult to find, buried in anodyne EPA reports. Here we have assembled research to help journalists writing about the chlorpyrifos debate.

Scientific research

The EPA’s 2016 summary of health effects in humans draws largely on 10 studies in some of the top academic journals, including three cohort studies lead by Virginia A. Rauh at Columbia University and published between 2006 and 2015. Rauh and her colleagues compared high- and low-exposure children at age 3 and found increased odds of mental development delays, psychomotor delays, attention disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in the high-exposure group. In a follow-up study with the same children at age 11, the authors found the high-exposure children more likely to have developed mild to moderate tremors. In 2011, the same researchers reported a negative correlation between chlorpyrifos exposure and both IQ and working memory.

Here are the other studies that led to the EPA’s conclusions — including one that observes a possible link between chlorpyrifos and autism in babies born to mothers who work in fields treated with the insecticide:

• “Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Urinary Metabolites of Organophosphate Pesticides.” Pediatrics, 2010.
  Organophosphates like chlorpyrifos may contribute to ADHD.
• “Urinary 3,5,6-tichloro-2-pyridinol (TCPY) in Pregnant Women from Mexico City: Distribution, Temporal Variability, and Relationship with Child Attention and Hyperactivity.” International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, 2014.
  Fetal exposure to chlorpyrifos may contribute to ADHD in childhood.
• “Prenatal Exposure to Organophosphate Pesticides and Reciprocal Social Behavior in Childhood.” Environment International, 2014.
  A study of African Americans in New York City found prenatal exposure to compounds in the same family as chlorpyrifos may impair social functioning, especially in boys.
• “Organophosphate Pesticide Exposure and Neurodevelopment in Young Shanghai Children.” Environmental Science and Technology, 2012.
  Children may be more vulnerable to pesticides like chlorpyrifos because they lack the enzymes to deactivate them. This study from Shanghai did not find a relationship between such pesticides and impaired mental development, though the authors urge caution interpreting the results and call for a longitudinal study.
• “Urinary Metabolites of Organophosphate and Pyrethroid Pesticides and Behavioral Problems in Canadian Children.” Environmental Health Perspectives, 2013.
  Found no link between organophosphates and children’s behavior, though it did find evidence that some compounds used to replace organophosphates may be linked to behavioral problems in children.
• “Impact of Prenatal Chlorpyrifos Exposure on Neurodevelopment in the First 3 Years of Life Among Inner-City Children.” Pediatrics, 2006.
  Children exposed to high levels of chlorpyrifos in utero and in early childhood scored significantly worse on motor- and mental-development tests at age 3 than children with low exposure.
• “Seven-Year Neurodevelopmental Scores and Prenatal Exposure to Chlorpyrifos, a Common Agricultural Pesticide.” Environmental Health Perspectives, 2011.
  Exposure to chlorpyrifos in utero and infancy is associated with lower cognitive performance at age 7 in inner-city, minority children.
• “Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Prenatal Residential Proximity to Agricultural Pesticides.” Environmental Health Perspectives, 2014.
  The use of chlorpyrifos near a pregnant woman’s home may increase the risk her baby develops an autism spectrum disorder.

Other research:

This 2017 paper in Environment International found prenatal chlorpyrifos exposure linked to reduced motor function in infants at nine-months. Girls, the study found, were more susceptible than boys.

A 2012 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes an association between exposure to chlorpyrifos in the womb and changes in the shape of the developing brain.

This 2006 paper in Environmental Health Perspectives monitored pesticides in children’s urine and found a “dramatic and immediate” decline when the children were fed organic foods.

Other resources:

Some EPA pages dating before January 20, 2017, have been deleted. To see a searchable version of the site as it was on January 19, 2017, click here.

California has studied the use of chlorpyrifos and considered tighter regulations. The state also has a comprehensive database of pesticide use, including an annual report on how many pounds of each chemical were distributed over how many acres.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture also has resources on pesticide usage nationwide.

If you are looking for exactly which species of fish or plant or arachnoid is impacted by chlorpyrifos, check out this EPA biological evaluation.

In its Toxic Substance Portal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) describes, in plain language, how humans can come into contact with chlorpyrifos, how it enters and leaves the body and what kind of test can demonstrate human exposure.

Dow Chemical has a website defending chlorpyrifos.

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Rising seas are one of the central impacts of global warming, and they’re not some abstract challenge for a future day: Areas of the United States now routinely have “sunny-day flooding,” with salt water pushing up through drains even in the absence of storms. When London built the Thames Barrier in 1982, it was expected to be used two to three times a year at most, but has since been employed at twice that rate, a pace that is expected to accelerate. U.S. Army facilities in coastal Virginia already see “recurrent flooding,” according to the Department of Defense. And longer range, things get even more challenging: For example, because of a sea-level “hotspot” on the Northeastern U.S. coast, tides could rise as much as 7.5 feet by 2100 in cities such as Boston. Proposals for a “Venice by the Charles River” are anything but far-fetched.

Yet even as the seas are rising, coastal areas are booming: From 1970 to 2010, the population in the coastal United States grew 39 percent, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which expects the population in these areas to increase another 8 percent between 2010 and 2020. As of 2010, 123 million Americans lived in coastal counties, at population densities more than four times higher than those of the country as a whole. The same pattern holds around the globe: 60 percent of cities with populations over 5 million are within 60 miles of the sea, and they’re growing rapidly. This rush to the shore puts more lives, wealth and infrastructure in harm’s way, increasing losses when storms inevitably hit. A 2013 study in Global Environmental Change estimates that by 2100 sea-level rise could put up to 7.4 million U.S. residents at risk — many of already disadvantaged — and cut the country’s GDP by as much as $289 billion.

While climate change remains a politically charged issue in the U.S. despite the overwhelming evidence, efforts are underway to better understand the risks, prepare for the future and increase community resiliency. The Department of Defense, per its “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap” of October 2014, has sought to adapt its facilities to a projected sea-level rise of 1.5 feet as early as 2034, though congressional Republicans have blocked efforts to fund the research. The landmark Paris Climate Accord, negotiated under the the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), was endorsed by 174 nations in April 2016. That notably included both the United States and China, though the U.S. has not yet ratified it. The pact lays out ways to limit or reverse harmful trends in greenhouse-gas emissions, with many suggestions that are “actionable” by state and local governments, businesses and individuals. Resources like FloodTools and the National Flood Insurance Program’s FloodSmart website aim to educate citizens about flood risks and preparedness measures, while the Georgetown Climate Center has page on state and local adaptation plans. And such adaptations can be effective: A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that large-scale urban adaptation strategies have the potential to counteract some of the effects of long-term global climate change.

Below is a series of studies examining climate-change related risks and the regions and demographic groups most threatened by them; efficacy of attempts thus far to mitigate these risks; and adaptive solutions for coastal regions. Many recent studies focus on particular communities facing inundation around the world.

———————–

“Trapped in Place? Segmented Resilience to Hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, 1970–2005”
Logan, John R.; Issar, Sukriti; Xu, Zengwang. Demography, 2016. doi:10.1007/s13524-016-0496-4.

Abstract: “Hurricanes pose a continuing hazard to populations in coastal regions. This study estimates the impact of hurricanes on population change in the years 1970–2005 in the U.S. Gulf Coast region. Geophysical models are used to construct a unique data set that simulates the spatial extent and intensity of wind damage and storm surge from the 32 hurricanes that struck the region in this period. Multivariate spatial time-series models are used to estimate the impacts of hurricanes on population change. Population growth is found to be reduced significantly for up to three successive years after counties experience wind damage, particularly at higher levels of damage. Storm surge is associated with reduced population growth in the year after the hurricane. Model extensions show that change in the white and young adult population is more immediately and strongly affected than is change for blacks and elderly residents. Negative effects on population are stronger in counties with lower poverty rates. The differentiated impact of hurricanes on different population groups is interpreted as segmented withdrawal—a form of segmented resilience in which advantaged population groups are more likely to move out of or avoid moving into harm’s way while socially vulnerable groups have fewer choices.”

“A Comprehensive Review of Climate Adaptation in the United States: More Than Before, but Less than Needed”
Bierbaum, Rosina; et al. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, March 2013, Vol. 18, Issue 3, 361-406. doi: 10.1007/s11027-012-9423-1.

Abstract: “We reviewed existing and planned adaptation activities of federal, tribal, state, and local governments and the private sector in the United States to understand what types of adaptation activities are underway across different sectors and scales throughout the country. Primary sources of review included material officially submitted for consideration in the upcoming 2013 U.S. National Climate Assessment and supplemental peer-reviewed and grey literature [working papers]. Although substantial adaptation planning is occurring in various sectors, levels of government, and the private sector, few measures have been implemented and even fewer have been evaluated. Most adaptation actions to date appear to be incremental changes, not the transformational changes that may be needed in certain cases to adapt to significant changes in climate. While there appear to be no one-size-fits-all adaptations, there are similarities in approaches across scales and sectors, including mainstreaming climate considerations into existing policies and plans, and pursuing no- and low-regrets strategies. Despite the positive momentum in recent years, barriers to implementation still impede action in all sectors and across scales. The most significant barriers include lack of funding, policy and institutional constraints, and difficulty in anticipating climate change given the current state of information on change. However, the practice of adaptation can advance through learning by doing, stakeholder engagements (including “listening sessions”), and sharing of best practices.”

“Future Flood Losses in Major Coastal Cities”
Hallegatte, Stephane; Green, Colin; Nicholls, Robert J.; Corfee-Morlot, Jan. Nature Climate Change, August 2013, 3:802-806. doi: 10.1038/nclimate1979.

Abstract: “Flood exposure is increasing in coastal cities owing to growing populations and assets, the changing climate, and subsidence. Here we provide a quantification of present and future flood losses in the 136 largest coastal cities. Using a new database of urban protection and different assumptions on adaptation, we account for existing and future flood defenses. Average global flood losses in 2005 are estimated to be approximately U.S. $6 billion per year, increasing to U.S. $52 billion by 2050 with projected socio-economic change alone. With climate change and subsidence, present protection will need to be upgraded to avoid unacceptable losses of U.S.$1 trillion or more per year. Even if adaptation investments maintain constant flood probability, subsidence and sea-level rise will increase global flood losses to U.S.$60–63 billion per year in 2050. To maintain present flood risk, adaptation will need to reduce flood probabilities below present values. In this case, the magnitude of losses when floods do occur would increase, often by more than 50%, making it critical to also prepare for larger disasters than we experience today. The analysis identifies the cities that seem most vulnerable to these trends, that is, where the largest increase in losses can be expected.”

“Increasing risk of compound flooding from storm surge and rainfall for major U.S. cities”
Wahl, Thomas; et al. Nature Climate Change, 2015. doi:10.1038/nclimate2736.

Abstract: “When storm surge and heavy precipitation co-occur, the potential for flooding in low-lying coastal areas is often much greater than from either in isolation. Knowing the probability of these compound events and understanding the processes driving them is essential to mitigate the associated high-impact risks. Here we determine the likelihood of joint occurrence of these two phenomena for the contiguous United States (US) and show that the risk of compound flooding is higher for the Atlantic/Gulf coast relative to the Pacific coast. We also provide evidence that the number of compound events has increased significantly over the past century at many of the major coastal cities. Long-term sea-level rise is the main driver for accelerated flooding along the US coastline; however, under otherwise stationary conditions (no trends in individual records), changes in the joint distributions of storm surge and precipitation associated with climate variability and change also augment flood potential. For New York City (NYC)—as an example—the observed increase in compound events is attributed to a shift towards storm surge weather patterns that also favour high precipitation. Our results demonstrate the importance of assessing compound flooding in a non-stationary framework and its linkages to weather and climate.”

“Relative Sea-level Rise and the Conterminous United States: Consequences of Potential Land Inundation in Terms of Population at Risk and GDP Loss”
Haer, Toon; Kalnay, Eugenia; Kearney, Michael; Moll, Henk. Global Environmental Change, September 2013, 23:1627-1636. doi: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2013.09.005

Abstract: “Global sea-level rise poses a significant threat not only for coastal communities as development continues but also for national economies. This paper presents estimates of how future changes in relative sea-level rise puts coastal populations at risk, as well as affect overall GDP in the conterminous United States. We use four different sea-level rise scenarios for 2010–2100: a low-end scenario (Extended Linear Trend) a second low-end scenario based on a strong mitigative global warming pathway (Global Warming Coupling 2.6), a high-end scenario based on rising radiative forcing (Global Warming Coupling 8.5) and a plausible very high-end scenario, including accelerated ice cap melting (Global Warming Coupling 8.5+). Relative sea-level rise trends for each U.S. state are employed to obtain more reasonable rates for these areas, as long-term rates vary considerably between the U.S. Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coasts because of the Glacial Isostatic Adjustment, local subsidence and sediment compaction, and other vertical land movement. Using these trends for the four scenarios reveals that the relative sea levels predicted by century’s end could range — averaged over all states — from 0.2 to 2.0 m above present levels. The estimates for the amount of land inundated vary from 26,000 to 76,000 km2. Upwards of 1.8 to 7.4 million people could be at risk, and GDP could potentially decline by USD 70–289 billion…. Even the most conservative scenario shows a significant impact for the U.S., emphasizing the importance of adaptation and mitigation.”

“Risks of Sea Level Rise to Disadvantaged Communities in the United States”
Martinich, Jeremy; Neumann, James; Ludwig, Lindsay; Jantarasami, Lesley. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, February 2013, Vol. 18, Issue 2, 169-185. doi: 10.1007/s11027-011-9356-0.

Abstract: “Climate change and sea level rise (SLR) pose risks to coastal communities around the world, but societal understanding of the distributional and equity implications of SLR impacts and adaptation actions remains limited. Here, we apply a new analytic tool to identify geographic areas in the contiguous United States that may be more likely to experience disproportionate impacts of SLR, and to determine if and where socially vulnerable populations would bear disproportionate costs of adaptation. We use the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) to identify socially vulnerable coastal communities, and combine this with output from a SLR coastal property model that evaluates threats of inundation and the economic efficiency of adaptation approaches to respond to those threats. Results show that under the mid-SLR scenario (66.9 cm by 2100), approximately 1,630,000 people are potentially affected by SLR. Of these, 332,000 (∼20%) are among the most socially vulnerable. The analysis also finds that areas of higher social vulnerability are much more likely to be abandoned than protected in response to SLR. This finding is particularly true in the Gulf region of the United States, where over 99% of the most socially vulnerable people live in areas unlikely to be protected from inundation, in stark contrast to the least socially vulnerable group, where only 8% live in areas unlikely to be protected. Our results demonstrate the importance of considering the equity and environmental justice implications of SLR in climate change policy analysis and coastal adaptation planning.”

“Coastal Flood Damage and Adaptation Costs under 21^st Century Sea-level Rise”
Hinke, Jochen; et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2014, Vol. 111, No. 9, 3292-3297. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1222469111.

Abstract: “Coastal flood damage and adaptation costs under 21st century sea-level rise are assessed on a global scale taking into account a wide range of uncertainties in continental topography data, population data, protection strategies, socioeconomic development and sea-level rise. Uncertainty in global mean and regional sea level was derived from four different climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5, each combined with three land-ice scenarios based on the published range of contributions from ice sheets and glaciers. Without adaptation, 0.2–4.6% of global population is expected to be flooded annually in 2100 under 25–123 cm of global mean sea-level rise, with expected annual losses of 0.3–9.3% of global gross domestic product. Damages of this magnitude are very unlikely to be tolerated by society and adaptation will be widespread. The global costs of protecting the coast with dikes are significant with annual investment and maintenance costs of US$12–71 billion in 2100, but much smaller than the global cost of avoided damages even without accounting for indirect costs of damage to regional production supply. Flood damages by the end of this century are much more sensitive to the applied protection strategy than to variations in climate and socioeconomic scenarios as well as in physical data sources (topography and climate model). Our results emphasize the central role of long-term coastal adaptation strategies. These should also take into account that protecting large parts of the developed coast increases the risk of catastrophic consequences in the case of defense failure.”

“Climate Change Risks to U.S. Infrastructure: Impacts on Roads, Bridges, Coastal Development and Urban Drainage”
Neumann, James E.; et al. Climatic Change, January 2014. doi: 10.1007/s10584-013-1037-4.

Abstract: “Changes in temperature, precipitation, sea level, and coastal storms will likely increase the vulnerability of infrastructure across the United States. Using four models that analyze vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation, this paper estimates impacts to roads, bridges, coastal properties, and urban drainage infrastructure and investigates sensitivity to varying greenhouse gas emission scenarios, climate sensitivities, and global climate models. The results suggest that the impacts of climate change in this sector could be large, especially in the second half of the 21st century as sea-level rises, temperature increases, and precipitation patterns become more extreme and affect the sustainability of long-lived infrastructure. Further, when considering sea-level rise, scenarios which incorporate dynamic ice sheet melting yield impact model results in coastal areas that are roughly 70% to 80% higher than results that do not incorporate dynamic ice sheet melting. The potential for substantial economic impacts across all infrastructure sectors modeled, however, can be reduced by cost-effective adaptation measures. Mitigation policies also show potential to reduce impacts in the infrastructure sector — a more aggressive mitigation policy reduces impacts by 25% to 35%, and a somewhat less aggressive policy reduces impacts by 19% to 30%. The existing suite of models suitable for estimating these damages nonetheless covers only a small portion of expected infrastructure sector effects from climate change, so much work remains to better understand impacts on electric and telecommunications networks, rail, and air transportation systems.”

“Increased threat of tropical cyclones and coastal flooding to New York City during the anthropogenic era”
Reed, A.J.; et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1513127112.

Abstract: “In a changing climate, future inundation of the United States’ Atlantic coast will depend on both storm surges during tropical cyclones and the rising relative sea levels on which those surges occur. However, the observational record of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic basin is too short (A.D. 1851 to present) to accurately assess long-term trends in storm activity. To overcome this limitation, we use proxy sea level records, and downscale three CMIP5 models to generate large synthetic tropical cyclone data sets for the North Atlantic basin; driving climate conditions span from A.D. 850 to A.D. 2005. We compare pre-anthropogenic era (A.D. 850–1800) and anthropogenic era (A.D.1970–2005) storm surge model results for New York City, exposing links between increased rates of sea level rise and storm flood heights. We find that mean flood heights increased by ∼1.24 m (due mainly to sea level rise) from ∼A.D. 850 to the anthropogenic era, a result that is significant at the 99% confidence level. Additionally, changes in tropical cyclone characteristics have led to increases in the extremes of the types of storms that create the largest storm surges for New York City. As a result, flood risk has greatly increased for the region; for example, the 500-y return period for a ∼2.25-m flood height during the preanthropogenic era has decreased to ∼24.4 y in the anthropogenic era. Our results indicate the impacts of climate change on coastal inundation, and call for advanced risk management strategies.”

“Reducing Coastal Risks on the East and Gulf Coasts”
Committee on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Water Resources Science, Engineering, and Planning: Coastal Risk Reduction; Water Science and Technology Board; Ocean Studies Board; Division on Earth and Life Studies; National Research Council. 2014, the National Academies Press.

Summary: “Hurricane- and coastal-storm-related economic losses have increased substantially over the past century, largely due to expanding population and development in the most susceptible coastal areas… This report calls for the development of a national vision for managing risks from coastal storms (hereafter, termed “coastal risk”) that includes a long-term view, regional solutions, and recognition of the full array of economic, social, environmental, and life-safety benefits that come from risk reduction efforts. To support this vision, a national coastal risk assessment is needed to identify those areas with the greatest risks that are high priorities for risk reduction efforts. Benefit-cost analysis, constrained by other important environmental, social, and life- safety factors, provides a reasonable framework for evaluating national investments in coastal risk reduction. However, extensive collaboration and additional policy changes will be necessary to fully embrace this vision and move from a nation that is primarily reactive to coastal disasters to one that invests wisely in coastal risk reduction and builds resilience among coastal communities.”

“The Role of Ecosystems in Coastal Protection: Adapting to Climate Change and Coastal Hazards”
Spalding, Mark D.; Ruffo, Susan; Lacambra, Carmen; Meliane, Imen; Hale, Lynne Zeitlin; Shephard, Christine C.; Beck, Michael W. Ocean and Coastal Management, March 2014, 90:50-57.

Abstract: “Coastal ecosystems, particularly intertidal wetlands and reefs (coral and shellfish), can play a critical role in reducing the vulnerability of coastal communities to rising seas and coastal hazards, through their multiple roles in wave attenuation, sediment capture, vertical accretion, erosion reduction and the mitigation of storm surge and debris movement. There is growing understanding of the array of factors that affect the strength or efficacy of these ecosystem services in different locations, as well as management interventions which may restore or enhance such values. Improved understanding and application of such knowledge will form a critical part of coastal adaptation planning, likely reducing the need for expensive engineering options in some locations, and providing a complementary tool in hybrid engineering design. Irrespective of future climate change, coastal hazards already impact countless communities and the appropriate use of ecosystem-based adaptation strategies offers a valuable and effective tool for present-day management. Maintaining and enhancing coastal systems will also support the continued provision of other coastal services, including the provision of food and maintenance of coastal resource dependent livelihoods.”

“Sea Level and Global Ice Volumes from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene”
Lambeck, Kurt; Rouby, Hélène; Purcell, Anthony; Sun, Yiying; Sambridge, Malcolm, Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, September 2014. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1411762111.

Abstract: “Several areas of earth science require knowledge of the fluctuations in sea level and ice volume through glacial cycles. These include understanding past ice sheets and providing boundary conditions for paleoclimate models, calibrating marine-sediment isotopic records, and providing the background signal for evaluating anthropogenic contributions to sea level. From ~1,000 observations of sea level, allowing for isostatic and tectonic contributions, we have quantified the rise and fall in global ocean and ice volumes for the past 35,000 years. Of particular note is that during the ~6,000 years up to the start of the recent rise ~100−150 years ago, there is no evidence for global oscillations in sea level on time scales exceeding ~200-year duration or 15−20 cm amplitude.”

“Sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm periods”
Dutton, A; et al. Science, 2015. doi: 10.1126/science.aaa4019.

Abstract: “Interdisciplinary studies of geologic archives have ushered in a new era of deciphering magnitudes, rates, and sources of sea-level rise from polar ice-sheet loss during past warm periods. Accounting for glacial isostatic processes helps to reconcile spatial variability in peak sea level during marine isotope stages 5e and 11, when the global mean reached 6 to 9 meters and 6 to 13 meters higher than present, respectively. Dynamic topography introduces large uncertainties on longer time scales, precluding robust sea-level estimates for intervals such as the Pliocene. Present climate is warming to a level associated with significant polar ice-sheet loss in the past. Here, we outline advances and challenges involved in constraining ice-sheet sensitivity to climate change with use of paleo–sea level records.”

“The Multimillennial Sea-level Commitment of Global Warming”
Levermann, Anders; et al. Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, June 2013. Vol. 110, No. 34. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1219414110.

Abstract: “Global mean sea level has been steadily rising over the last century, is projected to increase by the end of this century, and will continue to rise beyond the year 2100 unless the current global mean temperature trend is reversed. Inertia in the climate and global carbon system, however, causes the global mean temperature to decline slowly even after greenhouse gas emissions have ceased, raising the question of how much sea-level commitment is expected for different levels of global mean temperature increase above preindustrial levels. Although sea-level rise over the last century has been dominated by ocean warming and loss of glaciers, the sensitivity suggested from records of past sea levels indicates important contributions should also be expected from the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets…. Oceanic thermal expansion and the Antarctic Ice Sheet contribute quasi-linearly, with 0.4 m °C−1 and 1.2 m °C−1 of warming, respectively. The saturation of the contribution from glaciers is overcompensated by the nonlinear response of the Greenland Ice Sheet. As a consequence we are committed to a sea-level rise of approximately 2.3 m °C−1 within the next 2,000 years. Considering the lifetime of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, this imposes the need for fundamental adaptation strategies on multicentennial time scales.”

“From the extreme to the mean: Acceleration and tipping points of coastal inundation from sea level rise”
Sweet, William V.; Park, Joseph. Earth’s Future, 2014. doi: 10.1002/2014EF000272.

Abstract: “Relative sea level rise (RSLR) has driven large increases in annual water level exceedances (duration and frequency) above minor (nuisance level) coastal flooding elevation thresholds established by the National Weather Service (NWS) at U.S. tide gauges over the last half-century. For threshold levels below 0.5 m above high tide, the rates of annual exceedances are accelerating along the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts, primarily from evolution of tidal water level distributions to higher elevations impinging on the flood threshold. These accelerations are quantified in terms of the local RSLR rate and tidal range through multiple regression analysis. Along the U.S. West Coast, annual exceedance rates are linearly increasing, complicated by sharp punctuations in RSLR anomalies during El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phases, and we account for annual exceedance variability along the U.S. West and East Coasts from ENSO forcing. Projections of annual exceedances above local NWS nuisance levels at U.S. tide gauges are estimated by shifting probability estimates of daily maximum water levels over a contemporary 5-year period following probabilistic RSLR projections of Kopp et al. (2014) for representative concentration pathways (RCP) 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5. We suggest a tipping point for coastal inundation (30 days/per year with a threshold exceedance) based on the evolution of exceedance probabilities. Under forcing associated with the local-median projections of RSLR, the majority of locations surpass the tipping point over the next several decades regardless of specific RCP.”

Keywords: research roundup, Katrina, Sandy, preparedness, global warming, water, oceans, sea level rise

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A 2014 review paper in The Lancet Neurology identified a number of potential development neurotoxins in children, including manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, tetrachloroethylene, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. One of these — fluoride — has continued to fuel a discussion since the article’s publication, as the water supplies of approximately 74 percent of the U.S. population have fluoridation. While the debate hasn’t yet risen to the same level as those over vaccines or global warming, some U.S. municipalities are reassessing the amount of fluoride in their water sources — or whether to fluoridate at all.

Journalists and communicators of all kinds should review the best research and the history of misinformation on the topic, and to avoid false balance — “he said, she said” characterizations — where the science remains definitive. In particular, not examining the dose in question — levels of fluoridation proposed or studied — can lead to faulty reporting.

History and state of the field

U.S. towns and cities started adjusting the amount of fluoride in their water about 70 years ago when research linked increased fluoride levels to improved dental health. Supporters of fluoridation state that it leads to healthier communities — and is economical and easy. While recognizing the important balance of effectiveness, dose and safety, the leading scientific and health groups are overwhelmingly pro-fluoridation. In April 2015, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommended reducing the level of fluoride in drinking water to 0.7 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water. Its previous recommendation, outlined in its 1962 Drinking Water Standards, ranged from 0.7–1.2 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water.

Among the groups supporting fluoridation are the American Dental Association, the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization. The American Dental Association has called community water fluoridation “one of ten great public health achievements of the 20th century.” In a video posted to YouTube in December 2015, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy credited water fluoridation with helping reduce the prevalence and severity of tooth decay.

The CDC summarizes the chronology of the leading research by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The American Association of Dental Research held a special session during their 2014 annual meeting titled “Water Fluoridation: Safety, Efficacy and Value in Oral Health Care.” Outcomes from this meeting include general consensus that no scientific evidence exists to support the claimed negative health effects of fluoridation other than fluorosis — a change in the appearance of tooth enamel that can include white spots, staining and pitting. According to the CDC, dental fluorosis occurs when young children take in too much fluoride over a long period, when their teeth are forming under their gums.

Opposition background

Despite the evidence supporting the safety and efficacy of fluoridation, anti-fluoride critics have extended their influence and challenged public health experts. They claim that fluoride in drinking water has led to rising levels of fluorosis and can increase the risk of cancer. Some communities even reject fluoridation. For example, voters in Portland, Oregon did so in 2013, the fourth time in almost 60 years — overruling the city’s commissioners, who had agreed to fluoridate the city’s water supply. In January 2016, city officials in Durango, Colorado were debating whether to stop adding fluoride to city drinking water. In early 2016, residents of Healdsburg, California and those in Collier County, Florida were pushing their leaders to do the same thing.

Anti-fluoride groups such as the Fluoride Action Network have effectively used social media to convey their message, and some have lobbied the EPA’s Office of Water to “determine a scientifically based (not politically influenced) MCLG (maximum contaminant level goal) for fluoride.” However, the EPA and the Department of Health and Human Services base their current fluoridation recommendations on their own rigorous scientific assessments and on those of the National Academy of Sciences, all of which take into account the balance of dose, risk and health benefits.

The “Harvard study” and its limitations

In 2012, a review of studies linking high fluoridation levels with reduced IQ scores was published in Environmental Health Perspectives. Nicknamed the “Harvard study,” this report combined the results of 27 studies and found that “children in high­ fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low­-fluoride areas.” The review concluded that the “results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children’s neurodevelopment.” Experts writing in The Lancet criticized the study for a variety of serious flaws, however. Media outlets such as the Wichita Eagle dug into the research, and found that 25 of the studies analyzed took place in China, where natural fluoride levels were much higher than those in controlled U.S. public water systems. But that did not stop Witchita officials and groups from using the study to help persuade voters to reject fluoridation.

In any discussion of the “Harvard study,” it might be noted that the Deans of the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine and Harvard School of Public Health have publicly expressed their support for fluoridation.

Useful studies for background

The following are authoritative research studies and accounts of fluoride; they serve as useful citations for communicators reporting on related issues:

• A 2016 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, “Economic Evaluation of Community Water Fluoridation: A Community Guide Systematic Review,” offers a recent re-examination of the benefits and costs of community water fluoridation.
• The National Research Council 2006 review “Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA’s Standards.” This report suggests slightly lowered levels of fluoride but supports the use of fluoride for public health reasons.
• A 2009 paper in the European Archives of Paediatric Dentistry, “Water Fluoridation,” presents decisive evidence for preventing tooth decay among children and states that “no association between adverse effects and water fluoridation has been established.”
• A 2014 study in the American Journal of Public Health, “Community Water Fluoridation and Intelligence: Prospective Study in New Zealand,” seeks to clarify the fluoride-intelligence issue. It states that previous studies supporting the “lowered IQ” hypothesis have likely been subject to methodological errors, or “confounding.”
• A 2007 study in the Journal of Dental Research, “Effectiveness of Fluoride in Preventing Caries in Adults,” finds evidence that fluoridation prevents cavities (caries) “among adults of all ages.”
• A 1996 study in the Journal of Public Health Dentistry, “The Effectiveness of Community Water Fluoridation in the United States,” notes that the “data on effectiveness and safety are compelling.”
• A 2000 research review by the University of York (U.K.) also presents a useful summary of academic literature.

Keywords: local reporting, safety, science

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In North America the winter of 2014-2015 was one for the record books — in particular, 108.6 inches of snow fell in Boston, breaking a longstanding record. But melting snow can bring rising waters, as indicated by a March 2015 report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which highlighted the approaching flood risks for New England and Upstate New York as well as for southern Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

The role of human-induced climate change in the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events is well established. The 2014 Vermont Climate Assessment found that since 1960 average temperatures in that state have climbed 1.3 degrees and annual precipitation by nearly 6 inches, with the majority of the increase occurring after 1990. The 2011 Vermont floods and those in North Dakota in 2009 show how devastating such events can be. The projected rise in sea levels will also create profound challenges for coastal communities large and small.

According to a 2013 report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), just 18% of Americans living in flood zones have the required insurance — not comforting news for them or for federal and state governments, charged with providing material and financial disaster relief after the fact. Data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) indicates that between 2006 and 2010, the average flood claim was nearly $34,000, and large events can impose substantially higher costs. According to the CRS, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) paid out between $12 and $15 billion after Hurricane Sandy — more than triple the $4 billion in cash and borrowing authority it initially had. Starting in 2016, states seeking to receive disaster-preparedness funds must have plans in place to mitigate the effects of climate change, or risk losing funding, FEMA announced in March 2016.

A 2015 study published in Nature Climate Change, “The Changing Nature of Flooding across the Central United States,” examines long-term trends in the frequency and intensity of flood events. The researchers, Iman Mallakpour and Gabriele Villarini of the University of Iowa, used data from 774 stream gauges over the period 1962 to 2011. Gauges had at least 50 years of data with no gaps of more than two continuous years. The 14 states examined were Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The study’s key findings include:

• In the Central United States (CUS) the frequency of flooding events has been increasing, while the magnitude of historic events has been decreasing. Overall, 34% of the stations (264) showed an increasing trend in the number of flood events, 9% (66) a decrease, and 57% (444) no significant change.

• The largest proportion of flood events was in the spring and summer, and 6% of the stations (46) showed increasing trends in the spring, and 30% (227) in the summer. “Most of the flood peaks in the northern part of the CUS tend to occur in the spring and are associated with snow melt, rain falling on frozen ground and rain-on-snow events.”
• Increased flood frequency was concentrated from North Dakota down to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Areas with decreasing flood frequencies were to the southwest (Kansas and Nebraska) and to the northeast (northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan).
• “Trends of rising temperature yield an increase in available energy for snow melting, and the observed trends in increasing flood frequency over the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin can, consequently, be related to both increasing temperature and rainfall.”

The researchers note that “a direct attribution of these changes in discharge, precipitation and temperature to human impacts on climate represents a much more complex problem that is very challenging to address using only observational records.” At the same time, “changes in flood behavior along rivers across the CUS can be largely attributed to concomitant changes in rainfall and temperature, with changes in the land surface potentially amplifying this signal.”

Related research: A 2011 metastudy from the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, “Have Disaster Losses Increased Due to Anthropogenic Climate Change?” analyzes the results of 22 peer-reviewed studies on economic losses from weather disasters and the potential connection to human-caused global warming. It found that while economic losses from weather-related natural hazards — including storms, cyclones, floods and wildfires — have increased around the globe, the exposure of costly assets is by far the most important driver.

Keywords: global warming, climate change, flooding, snowfall, rain, precipitation, disasters, water

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On May 27, 2015, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) jointly issued a new set of rules relating to the scope of the 1972 Clean Water Act, potentially changing the nature of oversight of the country’s streams and wetlands in order to protect against pollution and destruction. News of this “Waters of the United States” plan was greeted by strong criticism from some members of Congress, who saw the move as an overreach by the federal government. Industry groups in agriculture, energy and construction likewise voiced significant concern.

The issue here — with wide implications for municipalities, and local news media, across the country — is the degree to which smaller bodies of water and wetlands may fall under federal regulations. The Army Corps and EPA note that the Clean Water Act technically applies to “navigable waters,” but several Supreme Court rulings have necessitated clarification on precisely what that means. Importantly, in the 2006 case Rapanos v. United States, the Court rejected the idea that merely being “adjacent” to a navigable waterway qualifies smaller bodies of water or marshes for federal regulation. But the Court’s majority was not monolithic in its reasoning, and in a concurring opinion for the majority, Justice Kennedy wrote that waters with a “significant nexus” to a navigable waterway could fall under the Clean Water Act, though he suggested that such a nexus needed to be better defined. The Army Corps and the EPA, which are sure to face legal scrutiny, rely heavily on Kennedy’s opinion, but they also state that the new rule is based on the peer-reviewed science:

Scientists routinely combine the effects of groups of waters, aggregating the known effect of one water with those of ecologically similar waters in a specific geographic area, or to a certain scale. This is because the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of downstream waters is directly related to the aggregate contribution of upstream waters that flow into them, including any tributaries and connected wetlands.

The EPA notes that it examined more than 1,200 peer-reviewed studies related to water quality and the connectivity of bodies of water and wetlands. The evidence is contained in the accompanying “Science Report,” which synthesized the literature.

While there are many threats to water quality — and the vast research literature can be overwhelmingly narrow and technical — one of the greatest and longest-standing concerns relates to the overall use of pesticides and the effects on both aquatic life and human health. A 2014 study by researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey, “Pesticides in U.S. Streams and Rivers: Occurrence and Trends during 1992−2011,” usefully provides a fairly broad, contextual view of facts and trends. In terms of the study’s scope and methods, the researchers — Wesley W. Stone, Robert J. Gilliom and Karen R. Ryberg — evaluated a “selected subset of pesticides in use over the last two decades that were sampled at enough sites to attain a reasonable national distribution and representation of land uses during 2002−2011. The analysis includes 123 pesticide compounds analyzed in filtered water samples assessed during 2002−2011, of which 47 also were assessed during 1992−2001.”

Findings of the study, which was published in Environmental Science and Technology, include:

• The data show that “pesticides assessed during 1992−2011, which represent somewhat less than half the amount of synthetic organic herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides used for agriculture in the U.S., frequently occurred in streams and rivers and pose continuing and widespread concerns for aquatic life based on benchmark exceedances.”
• Further, “The potential for adverse effects is likely greater than these results indicate because a wide range of potentially important pesticide compounds were not included in the assessment.”
• “Overall, the proportions of assessed streams with one or more pesticides that exceeded an aquatic life benchmark were very similar between the two decades for agricultural (69% during 1992−2001 compared to 61% during 2002−2011) and mixed-land-use streams (45% compared to 46%). Urban streams, in contrast, increased from 53% during 1992−2011 to 90% during 2002−2011, largely because of fipronil and dichlorvos.”
• In terms of human health, the study did not specifically examine water quality at drinking water intakes. The preliminary evidence suggests improving conditions: “During 1992−2001, 17% of agricultural streams and 5% of mixed-land-use streams had annual mean pesticide concentrations that exceeded human-health benchmarks.” However, “During 2002−2011, only one agricultural stream and no urban or mixed-land-use streams exceeded human-health benchmarks for any of the measured pesticides.”
• Atrazine, a chemical used in herbicides that is widely employed across the United States for crops such as corn, accounted for the only problem area with respect to human health standards in the later period, 2002-2011. (The science around that chemical remains enormously controversial.)
• This “decline in the number of streams and pesticides exceeding human-health benchmarks from 1992− 2001 to 2002−2011 is consistent with regulatory changes and reductions in use between the two decades for these pesticides.”

“[S]ampling frequencies in this study were not adequate to reliably characterize the highest short-term concentrations and it focused on pesticides dissolved in water, whereas some hydrophobic pesticides, such as legacy organochlorines and pyrethroid insecticides, are important as contaminants of sediment and tissues and should be considered when evaluating stream ecosystems,” the researchers note. “Pyrethroid insecticides have been found to be toxicologically important in both agricultural and urban affected streams…. Clearly, some of the pesticides not included in the present assessment may add substantially to overall occurrence and potential environmental significance.”

Related research: For perspective on the scope of usage of these chemicals, see the USGS Pesticide National Synthesis Project, which charts the geographical use of chemicals such as atrazine:

Keywords: Clean Water Act, EPA, water quality, wetlands, ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, marshes, contamination, environmental degradation

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