In May, researchers from the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy group, released a study that analyzed data in more than 2,700 California community water systems from 2011 to 2015. Instead of look at each possible pollutant separately, they looked at how drinking water pollutants interact to affect human health.
“Drinking water rarely contains only one contaminant, yet regulators currently assess the health hazards of tap water pollutants one by one. This ignores the combined effects of multiple pollutants, which is how people ingest them in the real world,” the group said in a statement.
The estimated 15,449 added cancer cases over the course of 70 years means 221 annual cancer cases from drinking-water pollution, researchers said in an article published April 30th 2019 in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health.