More Than 6 Million Americans Drink Toxic Water

We all fear cancer, and almost everything these days can link to it, but our drinking water shouldn’t.

A study has revealed that for six million Americans, drinking water supplies contain unsafe levels of industrial chemicals that have linked to many serious issues, including cancer.

The chemicals, known as PFASs (for polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances), are used in various products such as food wrappers to clothing. These chemicals have been traced to an increase risk of kidney and testicular cancers, hormone disruption, obesity, and high cholesterol.

According to the lead study author Xindi Hu, a public health and engineering researcher at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “PFASs are a group of persistent manmade chemicals that have been in use since 60 years ago.”

According to Hu, once these chemicals get into the water, they’re hard to get out. He has said that, “most current wastewater treatment processes do not effectively remove PFASs.”

In the study, researchers looked at concentrations of six types of these chemicals in more than 36,000 water samples collected nationwide by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2013-2015. This was to assess how many people may be exposed to PFASs in drinking water supplies.

The study found that PFASs were detectable at the minimum reporting levels required by the EPA in 194 out of 4,864 water supplies in 33 states across the U.S.

The study also revealed that drinking water from 13 states accounted for 75 percent of the unsafe supply. The states were California, New Jersey, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Georgia, Minnesota, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Illinois.

Hu also noted that there may be a lot more people affected, as researchers lacked data on drinking water from smaller public water systems and private wells that serve about one-third of the U.S. population. This is about 100 million people.