Researchers make alarming discovery about health impact of US tap water — here's what you need to know
Access to clean drinking water is a fundamental right. But a shocking new report suggests that millions of Americans may be consuming water laced with hazardous chemicals — including PFAS "forever chemicals," heavy metals, and even radioactive substances — at levels far beyond what experts consider safe.
A recent update to the Tap Water Database, compiled by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, analyzed water safety data from nearly 50,000 systems across the country between 2021 and 2023. The findings? A staggering 324 contaminants were detected in drinking water systems, affecting nearly every U.S. state.
"This is a wake-up call," EWG senior scientist Tasha Stoiber said in a statement.
While some of these contaminants — like nitrates from agricultural runoff or disinfection byproducts — have likely been present for years, others, including industrial pollutants like hexavalent chromium (made famous by the film "Erin Brockovich"), are newly emerging threats.
Alarmingly, regulations may not be keeping pace. The Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 mandates the Environmental Protection Agency to set safety limits on contaminants, but experts warn that many limits are outdated — or nonexistent.
Drinking contaminated water isn't just an environmental issue — it's a direct health risk. Long-term exposure to many of these chemicals have been linked to serious health conditions, including various cancers, endocrine disruption, developmental issues in children, and weakened immune function.
PFAS, in particular, have been found in the drinking water of over 143 million Americans, and because they don't break down over time, they accumulate in the body, increasing the likelihood of harmful effects.
The legal and regulatory landscape surrounding these contaminants is also shifting in concerning ways. While the EPA recently acknowledged that there is no safe level of PFAS — which stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — in drinking water and established federal limits, those protections are now at risk.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. recently paused lawsuits from both water utility and chemical industry groups, delaying stricter regulations from taking effect.
This delay raises fears that future policies could be weakened, leaving millions exposed to potentially toxic water.
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While there's still a long way to go, steps are being taken at both the state and federal levels to address water contamination. Some states — including California, Michigan, and New York — have implemented their own stricter regulations on contaminants like PFAS, setting limits beyond federal requirements to ensure safer drinking water.
Additionally, organizations like EWG, Clean Water Action, and Food & Water Watch are pushing for updated standards and increased funding for water treatment improvements.
Public pressure remains key in driving change. Supporting policies that strengthen drinking water protections and urging elected officials to take action can help push for meaningful reforms.
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Chicago Tribune
28 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
Robert F. Kennedy's vaccine committee to vote on flu vaccines and controversial preservative
ATLANTA — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's new vaccine advisory committee backed another option to protect infants against a dangerous virus — before turning to questions about fall flu vaccines and a preservative in a small fraction of them that some antivaccine groups have falsely tied to autism. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Thursday took up protections against RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, a common cause of cold-like symptoms that can dangerously inflame infants' tiny airways. In 2023, U.S. health officials began recommending two new measures to protect infants — a lab-made antibody for newborns and a vaccine for pregnant women — that experts say likely drove an improvement in infant mortality. That first antibody, called nirsevimab, proved to be 63% to 76% effective against emergency department visits for infants over the last year. US pulls funding from global vaccines group, saying it has 'ignored the science'On Thursday, the vaccine panel voted 5-2 that another newly approved antibody shot, Merck's clesrovimab, should be used similarly. The ACIP, created more than 60 years ago, helps the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determine who should be vaccinated against a long list of diseases, and when. Those recommendations have a big impact on whether insurance covers vaccinations and where they're available. Kennedy was a leading voice in the antivaccine movement before becoming the nation's top health official. He fired the previous 17-member panel this month and replaced it with a seven-member group that includes several vaccine skeptics. At its June meetings, the committee usually refreshes guidance for Americans 6 months and older to get a flu shot, and helps propel the annual fall vaccination campaign. Presentations prepared for Thursday's meeting suggest that the panel may do much the same this year. But there's also a flu-related vote that promises controversy. It concerns thimerosal, a form of mercury that's been added to vaccines since the early 20th century to preventing bacterial contamination in multi-dose vials. Kennedy has long held there was a tie between thimerosal and autism, and also accused the government of hiding the danger. Study after study has found no evidence that thimerosal causes autism. But since 2001, vaccines manufactured for the U.S. market and routinely recommended for children 6 years or younger have contained no thimerosal or only trace amounts, with limited exceptions. Thimerosal was placed on the meeting agenda shortly after Kennedy's new vaccine advisory was named last week. Before the vote, the committee will hear from Lyn Redwood, the former president of what is now known as Children's Health Defense — an antivaccine group founded by Kennedy. Some public health experts contend the thimerosal discussion will unnecessarily raise doubt in vaccines while possibly also making them more expensive and harder to get this fall. At the panel's meeting Wednesday, Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, lamented the ouster of the former ACIP panel and the agenda of the new one. Her organization, which represents large city health departments, 'is deeply concerned that many routine vaccines may soon become inaccessible or unaffordable for millions of Americans if ACIP makes changes based on ideology rather than science,' she said. 'The stakes are simply too high to let that happen.'
Yahoo
40 minutes ago
- Yahoo
I'm a physician who has looked at hundreds of studies of vaccine safety, and here's some of what RFK Jr. gets wrong
In the four months since he began serving as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made many public statements about vaccines that have cast doubt on their safety and on the objectivity of long-standing processes established to evaluate them. Many of these statements are factually incorrect. For example, in a newscast aired on June 12, 2025, Kennedy told Fox News viewers that 97% of federal vaccine advisers are on the take. In the same interview, he also claimed that children receive 92 mandatory shots. He has also widely claimed that only COVID-19 vaccines, not other vaccines in use by both children and adults, were ever tested against placebos and that 'nobody has any idea' how safe routine immunizations are. As an infectious disease physician who curates an open database of hundreds of controlled vaccine trials involving over 6 million participants, I am intimately familiar with the decades of research on vaccine safety. I believe it is important to correct the record – especially because these statements come from the official who now oversees the agencies charged with protecting Americans' health. In 1986, the childhood vaccine schedule contained about 11 doses protecting against seven diseases. Today, it includes roughly 50 injections covering 16 diseases. State school entry laws typically require 30 to 32 shots across 10 to 12 diseases. No state mandates COVID-19 vaccination. Where Kennedy's '92 mandatory shots' figure comes from is unclear, but the actual number is significantly lower. From a safety standpoint, the more important question is whether today's schedule with additional vaccines might be too taxing for children's immune systems. It isn't, because as vaccine technology improved over the past several decades, the number of antigens in each vaccine dose is much lower than before. Antigens are the molecules in vaccines that trigger a response from the immune system, training it to identify the specific pathogen. Some vaccines contain a minute amount of aluminum salt that serves as an adjuvant – a helper ingredient that improves the quality and staying power of the immune response, so each dose can protect with less antigen. Those 11 doses in 1986 delivered more than 3,000 antigens and 1.5 milligrams of aluminum over 18 years. Today's complete schedule delivers roughly 165 antigens – which is a 95% reduction – and 5-6 milligrams of aluminum in the same time frame. A single smallpox inoculation in 1900 exposed a child to more antigens than today's complete series. Since 1986, the United States has introduced vaccines against Haemophilus influenzae type b, hepatitis A and B, chickenpox, pneumococcal disease, rotavirus and human papillomavirus. Each addition represents a life-saving advance. The incidence of Haemophilus influenzae type b, a bacterial infection that can cause pneumonia, meningitis and other severe diseases, has dropped by 99% in infants. Pediatric hepatitis infections are down more than 90%, and chickenpox hospitalizations are down about 90%. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that vaccinating children born from 1994 to 2023 will avert 508 million illnesses and 1,129,000 premature deaths. Kennedy has asserted that only COVID-19 vaccines have undergone rigorous safety trials in which they were tested against placebos. This is categorically wrong. Of the 378 controlled trials in our database, 195 compared volunteers' response to a vaccine with their response to a placebo. Of those, 159 gave volunteers only a salt water solution or another inert substance. Another 36 gave them just the adjuvant without any viral or bacterial material, as a way to see whether there were side effects from the antigen itself or the injection. Every routine childhood vaccine antigen appears in at least one such study. The 1954 Salk polio trial, one of the largest clinical trials in medical history, enrolled more than 600,000 children and tested the vaccine by comparing it with a salt water control. Similar trials, which used a substance that has no biological effect as a control, were used to test Haemophilus influenzae type b, pneumococcal, rotavirus, influenza and HPV vaccines. Once an effective vaccine exists, ethics boards require new versions be compared against that licensed standard because withholding proven protection from children would be unethical. Kennedy has insisted on multiple occasions that 'nobody has any idea' about vaccine safety profiles. Of the 378 trials in our database, the vast majority published detailed safety outcomes. Beyond trials, the U.S. operates the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, the Vaccine Safety Datalink and the PRISM network to monitor hundreds of millions of doses for rare problems. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System works like an open mailbox where anyone – patients, parents, clinicians – can report a post-shot problem; the Vaccine Safety Datalink analyzes anonymized electronic health records from large health care systems to spot patterns; and PRISM scans billions of insurance claims in near-real time to confirm or rule out rare safety signals. These systems led health officials to pull the first rotavirus vaccine in 1999 after it was linked to bowel obstruction, and to restrict the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 after rare clotting events. Few drug classes undergo such continuous surveillance and are subject to such swift corrective action when genuine risks emerge. On June 9, Kennedy took the unprecedented step of dissolving vetted members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the expert body that advises the CDC on national vaccine policy. He has claimed repeatedly that the vast majority of serving members of the committee – 97% – had extensive conflicts of interest because of their entanglements with the pharmaceutical industry. Kennedy bases that number on a 2009 federal audit of conflict-of-interest paperwork, but that report looked at 17 CDC advisory committees, not specifically this vaccine committee. And it found no pervasive wrongdoing – 97% of disclosure forms only contained routine paperwork mistakes, such as information in the wrong box or a missing initial, and not hidden financial ties. Reuters examined data from Open Payments, a government website that discloses health care providers' relationships with industry, for all 17 voting members of the committee who were dismissed. Six received no more than US$80 from drugmakers over seven years, and four had no payments at all. The remaining seven members accepted between $4,000 and $55,000 over seven years, mostly for modest consulting or travel. In other words, just 41% of the committee received anything more than pocket change from drugmakers. Committee members must divest vaccine company stock and recuse themselves from votes involving conflicts. Kennedy has warned that vaccines cause 'immune deregulation,' a term that has no basis in immunology. Vaccines train the immune system, and the diseases they prevent are the real threats to immune function. Measles can wipe immune memory, leaving children vulnerable to other infections for years. COVID-19 can trigger multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children. Chronic hepatitis B can cause immune-mediated organ damage. Preventing these conditions protects people from immune system damage. Today's vaccine panel doesn't just prevent infections; it deters doctor visits and thereby reduces unnecessary prescriptions for 'just-in-case' antibiotics. It's one of the rare places in medicine where physicians like me now do more good with less biological burden than we did 40 years ago. The evidence is clear and publicly available: Vaccines have dramatically reduced childhood illness, disability and death on a historic scale. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jake Scott, Stanford University Read more: Vaccine misinformation distorts science – a biochemist explains how RFK Jr. and his lawyer's claims threaten public health RFK Jr's shakeup of vaccine advisory committee raises worries about scientific integrity of health recommendations Vaccines tell a success story that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Trump forget – here are some key reminders Jake Scott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Verdict expected in Italy 'forever chemicals' trial
A verdict is expected Thursday in the trial of 15 managers of a chemical plant accused of knowingly contaminating the water of hundreds of thousands of people in Italy. The now-shuttered Miteni factory near the northeastern city of Vicenza is alleged to have polluted one of Europe's largest groundwater basins with PFAS, dubbed "forever chemicals" because they never break down. The prosecution alleges that the plant in Trissino, which produced PFAS from 1968 and was run by three companies until its closure due to bankruptcy in 2018, leaked chemical-laced wastewater into a waterway, polluting a vast area between Vicenza, Verona and Padova. Fifteen managers from Mitsubishi, International Chemical Investors (ICIG) and Miteni are charged with contaminating nearly 200 square kilometres (77 square miles) of drinking water, as well as soil. Prosecutors in the trial, which began in 2021, have called for the managers to be sentenced to a total of 121 years in jail, lawyer Edoardo Bortolotto told AFP Thursday. Over 200 civil plaintiffs have joined the trial, including Greenpeace and local mothers who united after discovering their families had the chemicals in their blood. PFAS have been used since the late 1940s to mass produce the nonstick, waterproof and stain-resistant treatments that coat everything from frying pans to umbrellas, carpets and dental floss. But chronic exposure to even low levels of the chemicals has been linked to liver damage, high cholesterol, reduced immune responses, low birthweights and several kinds of cancer. The contamination was discovered in 2013 after Italy's environment ministry ordered tests of the Po River following a 2006 European project assessing exposure to such chemicals in rivers. Of all the rivers studied, the Po had the highest concentrations of one specific PFAS called PFOA, a known carcinogen. Further investigation identified Miteni as the source. At the time, there were no Italian or EU thresholds for PFAS content in drinking water, according to a regional report by the World Health Organization (WHO). ide/giv
