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PFAS chemicals are prevalent in many everyday products and the environment, raising health and environmental concerns due to their persistent nature and association with several health risks. Recent research reveals global source water often contains PFAS levels above safe drinking standards, highlighting the need for stricter monitoring and regulation.
“Many of our source waters are above PFAS regulatory limits,” says senior author of the study, UNSW Engineering Professor Denis O’Carroll. But some water providers – for example, Sydney Water – don’t routinely measure the broad range of PFAS potentially in our drinking water, says Prof. O’Carroll. “Two forms of PFAS initially raised of concerns about 20 years ago: PFOS and PFOA,” says Prof. O’Carroll. “These chemicals are regulated to different extents around the world. In the US, the proposed drinking water limits for PFOS and PFOA are four nanograms per litre.”
The study found that 69 percent of global groundwater samples with no known contamination source exceeded Health Canada’s safe drinking water criteria, while 32 percent of the same samples exceeded the US’s proposed drinking water hazard index.
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