News Coverage
Perchlorate: It's time for answers
Published April 28, 2003
Is perchlorate damaging the public health? Nobody can answer that question with any real degree of certainty. But this is a rocket fuel ingredient now contaminating critical Western water sources. Is there a possibility that it poses a health threat? That can be answered more confidently: Yes. The threat might be small, or it might be worrisome, no one can surely say. As currently understood, it's merely a concern -- a possibility obvious enough that prudent people would want to look into it and know more.
That means Washington should be raising the priority for perchlorate research. But it's moving in the opposite direction -- double-checking studies, making research cash tight, and now, reportedly, even imposing a gag order on Environmental Protection Agency comments until a new federal study is done in six or 12 months.
That's a mistake. In the interest of making diligent progress on a potentially significant public health issue, those policies ought to be reversed.
As The Press-Enterprise reported over the weekend, two new studies -- one commissioned by this newspaper -- raise fresh concerns that this isn't just a question of the water Inland residents are drinking. It may have to do with the Inland-grown vegetables people are eating all over the country.
The Press-Enterprise project involved testing at a Georgia lab of 19 samples of leafy vegetables (18 of them lettuce). Fifteen of the samples came from Inland supermarkets, two came from Imperial Valley farms, and two came from backyard gardens in Riverside -- one of several Inland communities fighting perchlorate in their groundwater. All the samples revealed perchlorate, most in a range of 7-12 parts per billion per 100-gram sample.
A similar study, conducted by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization, involved testing of 22 samples taken off the shelves of San Francisco Bay-area markets in January and February. Since 90 percent of the nation's winter vegetables come from this Inland region and Arizona, the odds are strong that many of these were Inland samples, too. The result: Four samples showed more than 30 parts per billion of perchlorate.
The obvious question is, how bad is that? The answer is, no one knows. At some level, perchlorate is suspected of causing thyroid problems. No federal standard has been set for perchlorate content in drinking water. Last year the EPA recommended that anything over one part per billion might be damaging to infant development. But defense contractors and the military have challenged that. The question of vegetable content is even less understood.
So, much remains to be done. That's what these two new lab tests say: They underscore how little we still know, and they remind Washington how important it is to start filling those gaps.