Tap Water

Chlorinating tap water is a critical public health measure that saves thousands of lives each year by reducing the incidence of waterborne disease. But chlorination is no substitute for cleaning up America’s waters.

On behalf of military contractor Lockheed Martin, Loma Linda University is conducting the first large-scale tests of a toxic drinking water contaminant on human subjects -- a precedent medical researchers and Environmental Working Group condemned as morally unethical and scientifically invalid.

n a little-noticed decision earlier this year, the EPA’s top scientific committee on children’s health declared that protections against the toxic weed killer atrazine in food and water should not be considered safe for infants and children. According to the Office of Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee:

Pollutants in rivers and other source waters throughout Ohio are contaminating drinking water statewide, a citizen monitoring project has found. Tap water in a dozen Ohio communities is contaminated - at levels well above federal safety standards or guidelines - with pesticides, chlorinated compounds and other chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects and other illnesses, according to tap water tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and Ohio Citizen Action.

The federal government and the states have adopted a high- cost, high-risk strategy in their drinking water programs, where consumers pay water suppliers to try to make polluted water drinkable. In spite of the vigorous efforts of drinking water providers, tap water made from dirty rivers and lakes is often host to multiple toxic chemicals, or is contaminated with the by-products of the clean-up process itself.

Mounting concern over long term health risks and the skyrocketing cost of water treatment associated with pesticide contaminated tapwater in hundreds of midwestern towns has forged an unprecedented alliance between water utilities, engineers, and chemists, and environmental protection groups.

Nitrate in drinking water at levels greater than the Federal standard of 10 parts per million (ppm) can cause methemoglobinemia, a potentially fatal condition in infants commonly known as blue-baby syndrome. According to Dr. Burton Kross, of the University of Iowa's Center For International Rural and Environmental Health, nitrate poisoning via drinking water contamination "certainly contributes to national infant death rate statistics" (Johnson and Kross 1990). Agriculture is the primary source of nitrate contamination.