Tainted Tap Water Sickens 1.1 Million Each Year
Sept. 14, 2012 – The pipes that ferry drinking water from public wells to home taps may let in viruses that cause more than a million cases of stomach illness every year, two new studies show.
“This is a really big deal,” says Jeffrey Griffiths, MD, MPH&TM, a professor at Tufts University and chair of the drinking water committee of the U.S. EPA's science advisory board. “This research is very important.”
“Our delivery pipe system is old in many parts of the country and leaky and not being replaced,” says Griffiths, who was not involved in the studies.
Griffiths says the research “really documents that it’s possible for people to get viruses that make them sick through their drinking water.”
The studies stem from the same government-funded research project. It is one of the largest ever to look at illnesses tied to public water supplies.
“The drinking water that we have in the U.S. is very, very good relative to other countries,” says researcher Frank Loge, an environmental engineer at the University of California at Davis. “But in terms of what we expect from our drinking water, in terms of health and safety, I was alarmed,” he says.
The project compared 14 public water systems in Wisconsin. Like more than 147,000 towns in the U.S., all the communities in the study pumped their public water from underground pools called aquifers. And like the majority of communities that rely on groundwater, the 14 in the study didn’t disinfect the water after it left those large wells.
For the first year, eight of the communities installed powerful ultraviolet (UV) lights to clean the water as soon as it left the underground pool. The other six continued to have no disinfection.
Scientists sampled water each month from the underground pool, from an area that was just past the UV disinfection, and then from six to eight home taps. The second year, the towns swapped. The eight towns that used UV disinfection turned their systems over to the six that didn’t have them. That let scientists compare how well the UV systems worked to clean the water.
“This is a really big deal,” says Jeffrey Griffiths, MD, MPH&TM, a professor at Tufts University and chair of the drinking water committee of the U.S. EPA's science advisory board. “This research is very important.”
“Our delivery pipe system is old in many parts of the country and leaky and not being replaced,” says Griffiths, who was not involved in the studies.
Griffiths says the research “really documents that it’s possible for people to get viruses that make them sick through their drinking water.”
The studies stem from the same government-funded research project. It is one of the largest ever to look at illnesses tied to public water supplies.
“The drinking water that we have in the U.S. is very, very good relative to other countries,” says researcher Frank Loge, an environmental engineer at the University of California at Davis. “But in terms of what we expect from our drinking water, in terms of health and safety, I was alarmed,” he says.
Looking at the Safety of Public Water Supplies
The project compared 14 public water systems in Wisconsin. Like more than 147,000 towns in the U.S., all the communities in the study pumped their public water from underground pools called aquifers. And like the majority of communities that rely on groundwater, the 14 in the study didn’t disinfect the water after it left those large wells.
For the first year, eight of the communities installed powerful ultraviolet (UV) lights to clean the water as soon as it left the underground pool. The other six continued to have no disinfection.
Scientists sampled water each month from the underground pool, from an area that was just past the UV disinfection, and then from six to eight home taps. The second year, the towns swapped. The eight towns that used UV disinfection turned their systems over to the six that didn’t have them. That let scientists compare how well the UV systems worked to clean the water.
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