A Report Assessment Of Health Risk From Organics In Drinking Water PDF Download

Considerable quantities of organic chemicals are used by industry and consumers each year in the United States, creating the potential for contamination of limited fresh water supplies with a wide variety of organic chemicals. Although drinking water standards have been established for many organic chemicals, there is a potential for contamination of water sources with unregulated chemicals. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), in conjunction with Rutgers University, has conducted a survey of public drinking water systems and has detected over 600 unregulated organic compounds in water samples from these systems. To evaluate the potential human health effects from drinking water exposure to these chemicals, a review of the scientific literature for toxicology data was conducted during this project. Toxicology data were not available for the majority of the chemicals, limiting the ability to assess the potential human health effects from drinking water exposure. Sufficient data were available to establish health based water criteria for 40 chemicals. The calculated drinking water criteria for these chemicals were greater than 1 ppb indicating that the chemicals are unlikely to present a risk to human health when present in drinking water at concentrations