This month, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue its proposed PFAS drinking water standards. Our nation’s water systems have limited resources, funding, and operational capacity. As such, the Water & Health Advisory Council believes that a national standard must be fully substantiated by toxicity and occurrence data before water systems are required to direct more funding and resources towards PFOS/PFOA monitoring.
Council member Joe Cotruvo, along with co-authors Susan Goldhaber and Andrew Cohen, recently published a peer-reviewed article “EPA’s Unprecedented Interim Drinking Water Health Advisories (HAs) for PFOA and PFOS” in the National Groundwater Association Journal. This paper discusses the interim EPA Drinking Water Health Advisories (HAs) for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) which were recently reduced to 0.004 ppt and 0.020 ppt, respectively.
While the EPA health advisories are not enforceable regulations, they can have severe economic consequences as some states have already begun to adopt them as operating guidance or enforceable regulations and set standards for drinking water and site remediation. The co-authors argue that the “unmeasurable and scientifically questionable EPA HAs will increase public concern about the health effects of these chemicals and will result in major expenditures in many of the 150,000 public water systems in the U.S.”