Did you know that only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act? Yet the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States. Government and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water, according to aNY Timesanalysis of government records.
But not one chemical has been added to the list of those regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000.
Other recent studies have found that even some chemicals regulated by that law pose risks at much smaller concentrations than previously known. However, many of the act’s standards for those chemicals have not been updated since the 1980s, and some remain essentially unchanged since the law was passed in 1974.
The analysis byThe NY Timesof more than 19 million drinking-water test results from the District of Columbia and the 45 states that made data available also found 62+ million Americans have been exposed since 2004 to “unsafe” drinking water.
Read here, for the full story.
