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What are the health
effects of contaminants in drinking water?
EPA has set standards for more than 80 contaminants that may
occur in drinking water and pose a risk to human health. EPA sets these
standards to protect the health of everybody, including vulnerable groups
like children. The contaminants fall into two groups according to the
health effects that they cause. Your water supplier will alert you through
the media, mail, or other means if there is a potential acute or chronic
health effect from compounds in the drinking water. You may want to contact
the supplier for additional information specific to your area.
Acute effects occur within hours or days of the time
that a person consumes a contaminant. People can suffer acute health effects
from almost any contaminant if they are exposed to extraordinarily high
levels (as in the case of a spill). In drinking water, microbes, such
as bacteria and viruses, are the contaminants with the greatest chance
of reaching levels high enough to cause acute health effects. Most people's
bodies can fight off these microbial contaminants the way they fight off
germs, and these acute contaminants typically don't have permanent effects.
Nonetheless, when high enough levels occur, they can make people ill,
and can be dangerous or deadly for a person whose immune system is already
weak due to HIV/AIDS, chemotherapy, steroid use, or another reason.
Chronic effects occur after people consume a
contaminant at levels over EPA's safety standards for many years. The drinking water contaminants that can have chronic effects are
chemicals (such as disinfection by-products, solvents, and pesticides),
radionuclides (such as radium), and minerals (such as arsenic). Examples of the chronic effects of drinking water contaminants are cancer,
liver or kidney problems, or reproductive difficulties.
For more information
- For information on the drinking water contaminants that EPA regulates,
see the Contaminant
Fact Sheets:
- EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have prepared Guidance for People
with Severely Weakened Immune Systems (
also available in Spanish )
- CDC also has a fact sheet on
Cryptosporidiosis
 a
disease caused by drinking water contaminated by the parasite cryptosporidium
.
- to learn how EPA sets limits on drinking water contaminants, read
Setting Standards for Safe Drinking Water .
- What are kid's sensitivities when it comes to drinking water? How
are EPA and its many partners working to protect them? Read
Children and Drinking Water Standards .
- EPA is studying a large group of contaminants and will decide in the
next few years whether these contaminants present enough of a health risk
that EPA needs to set health standards for them. EPA published the
contaminant candidate list in March 1998. Some of the well-known
contaminants that EPA is studying are:
- EPA has Health Advisories for some contaminants for which it has not set
drinking water health standards. These health advisory levels help public
health officials and consumers to know when there is a potential health
risk (for example, in the event of a chemical spill), but they do not have
any legal significance. View a chart of all the
Drinking Water Regulations and Health Advisories .
- There are several other highly technical resources on the potential
health effects of toxic substances, including contaminants that are sometimes
found in drinking water. Among these are EPA's
Integrated Risk Information System , the Agency for Toxic Substances
and Disease Registry's
ToxFAQs and
the National Library of Medicine's
TOXNET .
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