A man fills a glass with tap water. (photo: Adam Lister/Getty Images)
Elevated
Levels of Suspected Carcinogen Found in States' Drinking Water
By Hansi Lo Wang, NPR
02 April 16
Water
safety concerns aren't just in Flint, Mich., these days. Communities in three
states in the Northeast have found elevated levels of a suspected carcinogen —
perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA.
Used
to make Teflon, the chemical has contaminated water supplies in New York, New
Hampshire and Vermont.
After
a four-month ban in the village of Hoosick Falls, N.Y., the New York State
Department of Health declared the water safe to drink and cook with again on
Wednesday. A temporary filtering system has brought PFOA levels down to
nondetectable levels for weeks.
But
Michael Hickey isn't rushing to turn on his kitchen faucet.
It's
been more than two years since he has drunk from the tap. Since late November,
he and more than 3,400 of his neighbors in Hoosick Falls have had another
routine — stopping at the local supermarket almost every day to pick up free
rations of bottled water.
'It's
Heartbreaking'
For
Hickey, this saga began after his father died from kidney cancer in 2013.
"I'm
not a big environmentalist," he says. "I'm just an everyday guy that
came across a chemical that I felt the need to follow through on for my father
and my son."
His
father worked with PFOA, also known as C8, at a plastics factory that made
Teflon products near the village's wells. Hickey wondered, was there something
in the water?
He
paid to have water samples tested for PFOA. Results showed levels higher than
the Environmental Protection Agency's recommendation of 400 parts per trillion,
a provisional health advisory.
Follow-up
tests found levels 45 times higher than that — at 18,000 parts per trillion —
near the factory. Then, last November, the EPA told Hoosick Falls residents to
stop drinking the water, and Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, the factory's
current owner, agreed to pay for a filtration system and bottled water for
residents.
"It
didn't have to be this way. This is a beautiful little town. It's
heartbreaking," says Kathleen Reece, who has lived in Hoosick Falls for
more than a decade and has been taking shorter showers with the filtered water.
Questions
About Health
In
North Bennington, Vt. — a short drive across the New York border from Hoosick
Falls — tests found PFOA in private wells near a former plastics plant once owned by
Chemfab and later Saint-Gobain, though not in the town's
municipal water supply. Soil testers recently sampled dirt from homes with PFOA
levels higher than the Vermont Department of Health's standard of 20 parts per
trillion.
"Once
we started getting drinking water results, people were like, 'Well, what about
our gardens? What about the soils around our homes?' " says Richard
Spiese, who is overseeing the tests for the Vermont Department of Environmental
Conservation.
Those
are just some of the many questions that government officials are scrambling to
answer — and they're playing catch-up.
PFOA
has been around for almost 70 years. For decades, it was used to make nonstick
pans, stain-resistant carpets and even microwave popcorn bags. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention detected
small amounts of PFOA in the blood of more than 98 percent of Americans.
"It
stays in the body for many, many years, and it turns out to interact with
processes in our body," explains Philippe Grandjean, a professor of
environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health.
His research on PFOA has
found it can interfere with children's immune systems and make them less
responsive to vaccines. Other studies have shown a "probable link"
between the chemical and some types of cancer.
DuPont, 3M and other companies have
been sued for contaminating water with PFOA in West Virginia,
Ohio and Alabama. The EPA has pushed companies to clean up contaminated sites,
and many manufacturers in the U.S. have stopped using the chemical.
A
'Problem ... In Every Single State'
Grandjean
is concerned that PFOA's presence may be more widespread than initially thought
now that the Pentagon is investigating the water at 664 military sites that
used firefighting foams and may be contaminated with it and other
perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs.
"This
is not just a local problem. This is a problem which I am sure occurs in every
single state," he says.
That's
the same message the governors of New York, Vermont and New Hampshire sent to
the EPA in March.
In a joint letter, they
wrote that PFOA contamination is "a national problem that requires federal
guidelines and a consistent, science-based approach."
Still,
there's a lot researchers don't understand about PFOA.
"We
don't know how it moves. We also don't know what concentrations really are
going to incur a health risk," says Janet Foley, a chemistry professor at
Bennington College, where she co-teaches a class about how the chemical
interacts with the environment.
Foley
adds that PFOA is not unique: There are a lot of other industrial chemicals we
don't know much about.
"We're
so interested in making lots of new stuff. In order to do that, it needs many,
many different kinds of chemicals," Foley says. "It's unlikely that
they're going to be tested. A lot of times we don't know the questions to
ask."
The
question now is, exactly how much PFOA is safe to drink?
The
EPA has been trying to answer that question for years. Currently, there are no
enforceable regulations from the federal government. To set those standards,
the EPA says it needs more research on how PFOA
impacts humans.
But
the agency can set new recommendations, and it's working on them now.
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