U.S. Water Contamination Impacts 97 Million Residents

        According to scientists at the Silent Spring Institute, over 97 million Americans are exposed to unregulated contaminants in their drinking water, making up nearly a third of the population.  Hispanic and Black groups are more likely than other racial groups to have these contaminants in their water, as they are more likely to live in neighborhoods that are close to pollution sources.  These communities are generally situated closer to wastewater treatment plants, airports, military training areas, and industrial sites, all of which discharge pollutants into local groundwater through improper waste management procedures.  Some of these pollutants include 1-4 dioxane, Freon 22, and PFAS, which has been found to be more prolific in drinking water than originally thought.  The news writer suggests that historical factors such as racism and redlining have led to the siting of communities of color near heavily polluted sites.  The finding supports previous research about water contamination, with the conclusion that there needs to be more federal action to regulate these contaminants.

            For the most part, the article by Phys.org is a good summary that agrees with the message of the scholarly article.  The title of the news article has an attention-grabbing fact in its headline, stating that 97 million Americans are exposed to drinking water contamination, which to their credit agrees with the findings.  This contrasts with the title of the scholarly article, which only states that there are socioeconomic disparities in drinking water.  The scholarly article was more specific about the pollutants they studied, whereas the news article made it seem like there were only four important chemicals that the research group targeted.  But according to the researchers, there are 86,000(!) harmful chemicals in our drinking water (this could also have been an attention-grabbing headline).  An omission the news article made is that urbanicity (p=0.80) was more highly correlated with wastewater pollution than race (p=.34), even though minority groups in cities are more likely to be exposed.  It’s a significant omission because environmental justice is mainly an urban issue and not a rural one, so local governments need to be held more accountable.  Also, the news writer’s message was also more political; nowhere in the scholarly article does it mention racism or redlining as sources of the problem.

Phys.org has been my go-to source for science news for a long time.  Usually, they pay careful attention to detail and will offer a deeper explanation of scholarly articles than other popular science sites.  That’s why the omission about urbanicity comes at a surprise.  This is an important detail because their conclusion is that the federal government needs to do more to address the problem.  But since it is mostly taking place in cities, urban governments could be doing more as well.  Their conclusion would have been better if they had criticized urban governments for not doing more to realize environmental justice.

 

News article:

Silent Spring Institute. (2025, January 15). Over 97 million US residents exposed to unregulated contaminants in their drinking water, analysis reveals. Phys.org. Retrieved January 27, 2025 from https://phys.org/news/2025-01-million-residents-exposed-unregulated-contaminants.html

Scholarly article:

Maruzzo, A. J., Hernandez, A.B., Swartz, C.H., Liddie, J.M., & Schaider, L.A. (2025) Socioeconomic disparities in exposures to PFAS and other unregulated industrial drinking water contaminants in U.S. public water systems, Environmental Health Perspectives, 133 (1).  DOI: 10.1289/EHP14721