El Paso County to participate in CDC study on PFAS contaminants in drinking water

The CDC announced in September 2019 that doctors across the U.S. will be conducting a study to investigate the long term side effects of drinking water contaminated by PFAS and PFCS — man-made chemicals that can get into groundwater, soil, and eventually into your cells.

The PFAS levels in El Paso County (Colorado) have registered more than 1,000 times higher than the health advisory limit set by the Environmental Protection Agency for similar chemicals. And while clean up efforts have taken place, in some cases the damage has already been done.

In the next few months, hundreds of residents in El Paso County will be invited to join this new study that looks at the relationship between exposure and health outcomes.

“It’s a group of chemicals that was created in the 1950’s,” said Liz Rosenbaum, founder of the Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition. “Our organization started in November of 2016. Our main focus was understanding what PFAS was and what this contamination meant to our community.”

“This new research study is a great step forward in understanding the health effects from this contamination to the residents of the community who lived here before 2016,” she said.

So what makes this study different? Seven major medical institutions will work together on this multi-site study. In Colorado, the grant has been awarded to Dr. John Adgate at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

His team will look at exposures in El Paso County by taking blood samples from 1,000 adults and 300 children.

They’ll look at the immune system, increased cancer risk, fertility, and issues with growth.

“The big unknown with PFAS compounds is what the human health effects are from long-term exposure,” said Dr. John Adgate.

Dr. Adgate has already been working with citizens in the Fountain area for the past few years and he’s excited to work on the national study and answer important questions.

“What happened there is sort of an unfortunate natural experiment because we have people who are highly exposed and got much higher than national background levels of number of the PFAS compounds in their blood,” he said.

Concerned citizens like Rosenbaum say it’s important to understand these contaminants so we don’t repeat similar mistakes.

Each institution has been given one million dollars in grant money. The study starts in late 2019 and will run for 5 years.

Source: KDRO

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Many public drinking water supplies contain fluoride, which is added by water systems to help prevent tooth decay in consumers. But a new study has called into question whether those health benefits are outweighed by potential health risks.

“A study of 512 Canadian mothers and their children, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics … suggests that drinking fluoridated water during pregnancy could damage kids’ brains,” according to Insider. “In the study, boys between the ages of 3 and 4 years old whose mothers drank fluoridated water had slightly lower IQs (about 4.5 points lower, a small but noticeable difference when you consider that the average IQ score is around 100 points.)”

The study results have raised some red flags for consumers, adding fuel to an ongoing anti-fluoride movement. Fluoride addition began at public water systems as early as the 1940s, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention crediting the program with reducing cavities by about 25 percent in consumers. But opponents have linked the mineral to adverse health effects — including IQ loss — for years.

“This new study, if further evidence supports it, may give more scientific weight to the idea that fluoridated water is not the best route to prevent cavities,” per Insider.

However, for now, scientists are arguing that while this study is worth factoring into the equation, it is not enough on its own to completely condemn the practice of fluoridating drinking water.

“[Neurology professor David Bellinger] says it’s important not to read too much into a single study, but this one certainly raises important issues,” NPR reported. “Though it will no doubt play into the decades-long controversy over whether to add fluoride to public water supplies, he says that is misleading. The study found even in cities that had fluoridated water, women got most of their fluoride from other sources, such as food, tea and toothpaste.”

In any case, the findings of this study are almost certain to spur more research into the topic. While the controversy around fluoride in public drinking water supplies won’t die down any time soon, more research may better inform the approach taken by drinking water utilities.

Source: Water Online.

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Common Sense about Lead in Drinking Water

by Gene Franks

In ancient times, people drank from lead vessels because they didn’t know any better. There’s no longer any excuse.–Bloomberg News Editorial. 

Lead’s toxicity has been known for centuries, but lead remained a popular choice for water service lines installed up to the 1980s. It’s more flexible and durable than iron. About 6 million lead service lines are still in use today, connecting households to water mains. Prior to 1986, copper pipes inside a person’s home could also be joined with lead solder. —Olga Khazan in The Atlantic.

Some sobering information has surfaced because of the attention focused on the out-of-control lead contamination problems of Flint and Newark. We learn, for example, that the nation’s drinking water infrastructure has so many lead-emitting metal pipes that we can’t begin to count them, and, what is worse, we don’t even know where they are.

Here are some points to ponder:

•  Lead in water supplies is not a new problem. It is mainly public awareness of the problem that is new.
• The strategy for protecting the public from lead in water pipes, apart from vague, yet-to-be-funded proposals to replace the pipes, has been chemical treatment aimed at keeping pH high and adding sequestering chemicals. This seems to work most of the time, but the result isn’t predictable. Water treatment is complicated, and success can depend on variables like temperature, flow rate, and other chemicals present. Pipes and conditions in your home may be completely different from those where the supplier’s test was taken. Success of this strategy is also heavily dependent on the skill and dedication of the local technicians maintaining the system.
• Testing required by federal regulators is sporadic. Tens of millions of gallons of water pass through the pipes between mandated tests. Finding no lead at a test site on Elm Street doesn’t mean there isn’t lead in a home on Maple Street. I used to say that the way testing is conducted is like checking one passenger at the airport and if he doesn’t have a bomb,  you assume that the next ten million passengers are also bomb free. Actually, with lead it’s worse that that: it’s more like testing one passenger and assuming that the next ten million passengers as well as the passengers at the airports of surrounding cities are bomb free. The odds that you are protected from lead by a test done five miles from your home six weeks ago are pretty bad.
• The message we get from water suppliers seems to be: Be patient. We’ll get this fixed. You can count on us. Be sure to run your tap five to fifteen minutes before you drink the water. When things are really bad, they give free bottled water or provide a cheap pour-through water filter.

Conclusions

To protect yourself from lead, you could drink nothing but bottled water.  That isn’t a bad solution.  Or, you could  a) write letters to city officials demanding action, b) wait for all the lead water pipes to be replaced, c)  keep drinking tap water and hope for the best,  or, d) get yourself a good water filter. If you choose a through c, good luck.  If you choose d, I have some advice.

First, lead is a drinking water issue.  While whole house lead solutions are available, it is usually more practical to treat drinking water only. For lead-free drinking water, you have some good choices: a steam distiller, reverse osmosis, or a substantial carbon filter with lead removal resin added. Of the three, reverse osmosis is the most practical. Reverse osmosis removes lead by its nature, without the need for special cartridges. Reverse osmosis, of course, has the advantage of treating not only lead but virtually all contaminants that can be found in city water.

Lead reduction cartridge filters vary in quality, but any reasonably-sized undersink or countertop filter from a trusted filter maker will provide excellent, lead-free water. I underline “reasonably sized.” The pitcher filters provided free by cities don’t really qualify as water filters. They are novelty items made for pick up sales in discount stores. The early tests done on the city-provided filters in Newark that lead to a blanket “filters don’t work” warning were done with city-provided pitcher filters with only enough lead capacity for 30 gallons of water. They have a warning light for cartridge replacement that is there to inspire confidence. You really don’t need a warning light: you need more resin. A full-sized drinking water cartridge with lead removal rating of 2500 gallons from a reputable filter maker actually costs considerably less to operate than the tiny novelty systems.

Water and the Plight of Women in Ethiopia

Renowned Ethiopian artist Aida Muluneh has taken a series of striking images to depict the harsh life of many women in rural areas of Ethiopia–especially their daily efforts to obtain clean water for their families.

Aida Muluneh’s  Water Life series, which was commissioned by the charity WaterAid, is on display at London’s Somerset House beginning in late September of 2019. Muluneh shot some of the photos in a studio while others were staged in the extreme landscape of one of the hottest and driest places on earth, Ethiopia’s northern Afar region.

“We cannot refute that it is mainly women who bear responsibility for collecting water, a burden that has great consequences for our future and the development of our nation,” Muluneh said. The jerry cans are tied to a rope to reflect the shackles of carrying water.

Almost 40% of Ethiopians do not have clean water close to their homes, compared to the global average of 10%, according to Water Aid.

More symbolically complex, this shot focuses on girls and how the lack of water and bathrooms in schools affects their education. “The fact that most girls don’t attend school when they are menstruating is a major hindrance on the progress of women in our society,” Muluneh says.

In this piece, the moon represents a woman’s monthly cycle The red wings illustrate her freedom and strength but also the fact that she cannot achieve her full potential because she is shackled by the natural occurrence of menstruation.

“In a sense, it is like a caged bird that cannot fly but is grounded. The striped floor is symbolic of the road to destiny in which our path to success is in front of us but we must take the step forward,” Muluneh says.

More images from the Water Life Series can be seen on the BBC website.

WOTUS R.I.P.

The much celebrated and much hated Waters of the United States rule, aka WOTUS, appears to be dead. The Trump EPA along with the Army Corps of Engineers have, after a prolonged effort, finally killed it. The 2015 addition to the Clean Water Act was controversial from its inception because it lies on the sensitive line between individual rights and common good.  The ownership of water is really the same issue as the apparently unsolvable questions like gun ownership, abortion, and vaccination. It asks the question does water belong to everyone or to the individual who owns the land where it is found at the moment. In other words, can the farmer whose drainage stream is pictured above dump his leftover fertilizer or the refuse from his hog lot into the tiny stream on his property without concern for where it will eventually end up? Repeal of the Waters of the United States rule says essentially that no one can tell him what he can or can’t put into “his own stream.”

The Dr. Seuss classic story of McElligot’s Pool should have laid to rest any question about the connectedness of all water. Apparently not. 

Our feeling is that we’re all in this together. We need strict rules on water protection, even when these rules are an inconvenience to home builders, factory managers, and farmers. The Nixon-Era Clean Water Act has brought us a long way since the Cuyahoga River caught fire. It’s sad to see years of environmental progress reversed for the sake of political expediency.

Pure Water Gazette Editor’s Note: This AP article is the best we’ve seen on the massive lead pipe problem that American water systems are facing. We’ve added a couple of pictures. We ask you to read this article carefully. It is sobering.

Lead service lines are a menace to public health. Millions of such pipes still feed Americans’ homes.

A Bloomberg Editorial

Sept. 9, 2019

Once more an American city faces a lead crisis, with thousands of residents unable to drink from their taps. Lines for bottled water have stretched into the hundreds. Politicians are scrambling to overhaul the water system — and fast. This time it’s happening in New Jersey’s largest city, Newark.

Like the fiasco in Flint, Michigan, the Newark lead crisis had its own unique causes, including mismanagement and political infighting. But the two debacles have one crucial thing in common: pipes. Specifically the lead pipes installed decades ago, by the millions all over the country, to connect mains to houses and businesses. Pipes that can shed invisible molecules of metal when water passes through.

These pipes, known as service lines, were made from lead until well into the 1980s (even though lead’s dangers have been known for centuries). When the government banned lead from new pipes in 1986, it did nothing about the hundreds of miles of pipe still underground. At least 6 million such pipes (and likely many more) are still in use, serving households in almost one-third of the country’s water districts.

Lead is a neurotoxin. Its effects on the brain are well-known: learning disabilities, behavioral problems, anxiety and depression. It can also trigger heart, liver and kidney disease. Growing children are especially vulnerable. There is no safe level of exposure.

Right now, the standard practice is to treat water with anti-corrosion chemicals before sending it to households. Sometimes this works, but not always — as Newark shows. The city’s long-established corrosion control practice appears to have stopped working after the city made an unrelated tweak to the water supply. As is often the case, nobody saw it coming. As long as there’s lead in the pipes, the risk remains.

Why not just replace the pipes? That’s what Newark is doing — albeit belatedly — and what more than half a dozen other cities have done. The National Drinking Water Advisory Council recommends this approach. Granted, full replacement is costly and complicated, not least because most service lines are partly privately owned. But success in cities such as Lansing, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin, has shown that the legal and financial obstacles are surmountable. The state of Minnesota recently found that every dollar invested in lead-pipe replacement would yield $10 in savings.

Other cities have adopted more modest policies, such as replacing lines to day-care centers or requiring service lines be replaced when properties change hands. Whatever the approach, states can help by requiring home sellers to disclose the existence of lead service lines, for example — much like federal law requires sellers to disclose lead paint. States should also be more aggressive in tracking and publicizing the location of lines, and lay the legal groundwork to help communities fund replacement efforts. The federal government should provide grants to defray some of the cost.

It would be money well spent. Researchers at New York University say lead poisoning costs the U.S. $51 billion annually. And remediation works: Plans to phase out lead have proved to be spectacular public-health successes, though they were met with grumbles at the time.

In ancient times, people drank from lead vessels because they didn’t know any better. There’s no longer any excuse.

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Global Warming: Rising Sea Levels Threaten Egypt’s Alexandria

Flooding is now commonplace in Alexandria, and it continues to get worse.

Alexander the Great established the city more than 2,000 years ago. In that time, it has survived invasions, fires and earthquakes. But, Alexandria now faces severe flooding from rising waters blamed on climate change.

Alexandria is Egypt’s second largest city, with more than 5 million people. It is also an important port and home to about 40 percent of Egypt’s industrial activity. The city is surrounded on three sides by the Mediterranean Sea and sits next to a lake. Officials have built concrete barriers in the sea in an effort to reduce the force of waves. A severe storm in 2015 flooded large parts of the city. At least six people were killed in the flooding, which also caused the collapse of many homes.

In the late 1940s and 50s, Alexandria was a popular place for writers and artists from Egypt and other countries. Today, more than 60 kilometers of waterfront make Alexandria a top summer vacation spot. However, many of the city’s most famous beaches are already showing signs of damage.

The United Nations has warned that worldwide sea levels could rise by 0.98 meters by 2100, with “serious implications for coastal cities, deltas and low-lying states.”

Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation said the sea level rose by an average of 1.8 millimeters each year until 1993. Over the next 20 years, it rose by 2.1 millimeters a year. Since 2012, however, the rate became 3.2 millimeters each year.

Measurements show that the land on which Alexandria is built is also sinking at about the same rate. This is expected to increase the risk of dangerous flooding.

A 2018 research study predicted that up to 734 square kilometers of the Nile Delta could be under water by 2050. People living in low-lying areas are already experiencing problems.

A 52-year-old resident of the Shatby neighborhood, Abu Randa, said he has repaired his three-story home twice since the 2015 floods. “We know it is risky. We know that the entire area will be underwater, but we have no alternative,” he told The Associated Press.

Sayed Khalil is a 67-year-old fisherman living in the el-Max neighborhood, where hundreds of people were forced to leave their homes after the flooding in 2015. He said homes have flooded with seawater every winter in recent years. “It is hard to imagine that el-Max will be here in a few decades,” Khalil said. “All these houses might vanish. The area you see now will be an underwater museum.”

The government built sea defenses to protect the neighborhood, but people who live there say it has not made a big difference. “Every year the waves are much stronger than the previous year,” said Abdel-Nabi el-Sayad, a 39-year-old fisherman. “We did not see any improvement. They just forced people to leave.”

Some of the city’s archaeological treasures are also threatened. Among them is the citadel of Qaitbay, a fortress built in the Middle Ages on the ruins of the ancient Pharos lighthouse in the central harbor.

Ashour Abdel-Karim is head of Egypt’s General Authority for Shores Protection. He said the citadel is especially at risk. Powerful waves continue to push against the structure’s foundation. Officials were forced to build a long line of concrete sea barriers that can be seen from the downtown waterfront area known as the Corniche.

The Egyptian government has put aside more than $120 million for the barriers and other protective measures along the shore, Abdel-Karim said. He added that without barriers, parts of the Corniche and other buildings near the shore would be damaged. If that happens, he said, repairs could cost nearly $25 billion.

Article Source: VOA Learning English.

Tiny toxins: Measuring the “Forever Chemicals”

The reporting thresholds for the group of chemicals lumped under the PFAS label are minute.

Writer Martin Wisckol explains that using current California standards:

If PFOA is found in 14 parts per trillion, the water agency must notify the cities served by that well for the first round of testing, recently completed. For PFOS, the trigger is 13 parts per trillion. Those thresholds are dubbed “notification levels.”

For the next round of quarterly testing, the notification levels are being lowered to 5.1 parts per trillion for PFOA and 6.5 for PFOS.

In an Olympic-sized swimming pool, one part per trillion amounts to four grains of sugar.

In 67 trips to the moon, it would equal 1 inch.

If the combined total of PFOA and PFOS in a well is 70 parts per trillion or more — an amount known as the “response level” — the state recommends that the well be taken out of service, and the Environmental Protection Agency recommends that consumers be informed. A new state law kicking in next year will require customer notification.

What’s totally unknown is if the California standard is overly cautious or lax, since no federal standard for the contaminants has been set.

Although the chemicals have been around for decades, regular testing for them is recent.

California only this year began ordering testing for the chemicals, and a state law requiring that customers be notified about the presence of those chemicals won’t kick in until next year.

PFAS have been called “forever chemicals” because they resist breaking down in nature.

“PFAS is the climate change of toxic chemicals,” said Andria Ventura, toxics program manager for the advocacy group Clean Water Action. “They never go away. Virtually all Americans have them in their blood. Babies are born with them. They’re some of the scariest things I’ve worked on.”

Scientists discover it’s “raining plastic” from metro Denver to high in Rocky Mountain National Park

U.S. Geological Study research in Colorado finds “plastic is everywhere”

by Bruce Finley

Scientists testing rainwater around metro Denver and high in the Front Range mountains found microscopic bits of colored plastic in more than 90% of their samples — adding to growing evidence that plastics have contaminated the planet far more deeply than people can see.

This research led by U.S. Geological Survey research chemist Greg Wetherbee is raising questions about the possible impact on people and ecosystems. It’s unclear, for example, whether metro Denver drinking water treatment plants remove these tiny plastic fibers and shards.

“People might be seeing a lot of plastic in the oceans, on the ground, at the supermarket. But there is more plastic in the environment than meets the eye,” Wetherbee said in an interview Thursday. “Plastic is everywhere. It is in the rain and snow.”

The findings are summarized in a federal research report titled “It Is Raining Plastic” that was published in July after passing a four-stage, peer-review process. It’s based on analysis of 300 rainwater samples collected weekly in 2017 at six urban sites in the Denver-Boulder area and two in the mountains, including a seemingly isolated site in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Lab analysis using microscopes found water from the Colorado collection sites contaminated with blue, red, silver, purple and green fragments from the breakdown of larger pieces of plastic.

There are no limits in place, or standards, for this type of pollution, and federal scientists suggested the “microplastics” come from clothing through laundry drier vents, household materials such as tarps, and packaging that degrades, releasing bits that blow in the wind and wash into water — and presumably are evaporated into the atmosphere.

USGS scientists found more plastic particles in water samples drawn from the urban sites — which followed a line from the National Jewish Hospital in east Denver through downtown to Arvada, the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus and Boulder Canyon.

But Wetherbee and his team also found frequent plastics contamination in water samples drawn at a mountain site near Nederland and at a relatively isolated Loch Vale site at an elevation of 10,364 feet above sea level beneath towering peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park — a watershed that scientists have monitored for more than 20 years for chemical contamination from wind and rain.

The scientists concluded that plastics contamination of water “is ubiquitous and not just an urban condition,” the report said.

These results fit into recent research by European scientists who detected plastics contamination of water in the Arctic. A Utah State University scientist has been conducting studies focused on pollutants inside U.S. national parks.

Plastics fragments often are so small that they slip through water-cleaning filters and spread into rivers and oceans.

After revelations that many U.S. personal care products including soaps and toothpastes contained plastic “micro-beads” for scouring, Congressional lawmakers in 2015 began trying to prevent companies from making those projects in the United States. A phase-out was to begin in 2017. Several states, including California and New Jersey, passed laws requiring a total phase-out of micro-bead products by 2020. These are but one source of plastics pollution. Oceans around the world contain floating heaps of plastics, and larger pieces splinter over time into tiny bits.

The fragments detected in Colorado water are considerably smaller, scientists said. The consequences for human health and ecosystems are largely un-studied.

“An emerging contaminant issue”

Drinking water impacts are “a good question,” said Denver-based USGS research hydrologist William Battaglin, founder of the Consortium for Research and Education on Emerging Contaminants, a group of metro water professionals and scientists who meet regularly to discuss water pollutants that remain mostly uncontrolled.

“This is an emerging contaminant issue. It is something we should be aware of,” Battaglin said. “It is another impact of human society on the landscape that we were unaware of until recently.”

When Wetherbee began his research, he was looking for nitrogen pollution of water as part of a four-decade National Atmospheric Deposition Program that began with investigations of acid rain and broadened in 1978 to encompass other pollutants that spread from people into the natural environment.

Water samples were sent to a central lab in Wisconsin. Wetherbee asked to have filters sent back after testing. He wanted to see whether they’d caught heavy metals from possible industrial sources in Denver.

“I thought I’d better look at these things just to see what is on them. Then the data will make more sense.” He photographed each filter to preserve a record.

“I started to notice there were these pieces of plastic. Was it that surprising to see these plastics in the urban environment? Then, when I saw them in Rocky Mountain National Park, it started to be very surprising.”

Depending on funding, future USGS research in Denver, where the agency’s national water quality lab is located, will focus on measuring how much microplastic is spreading around the planet.

“Second, it is up to the ecological community to find out what the effects on ecosystems might be,” Wetherbee said. “It might not matter as much as we might suspect. It may be something we really need to worry about.”

At Denver Water on Thursday, utility officials familiar with the federal findings said they didn’t know whether microplastics are present in drinking water but would monitor research and adjust treatment processes accordingly.

“Denver Water is fortunate to have watersheds that are in great health, consisting of more remote mountain sites that provide us with high-quality snow runoff. Denver’s drinking supply does not come from the metro Denver area that the USGS study sampled,” utility spokesman Travis Thompson said in an emailed response to queries from The Denver Post.

“As Denver Water’s scientists learn more about emerging issues like this, we use that to inform monitoring programs, management of our watersheds and treatment processes to ensure Denver’s tap water always meets or goes above and beyond the strict federal regulations and water quality standards.”

Source: Denver Post

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