NYT: "Safe" tap water can legally contain dangerous levels of cancer-causing agents

More this week from the New York Times about the safety (or should we say unsafety) of our tap water. Current regulations and laws, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act, simply aren't stringent enough to guarantee that the tap water flowing from our faucets is pure, safe and free of toxic chemicals.

The latest in the newspaper's Toxic Waters series highlights the harm that can be caused by so-called legal levels of toxins and contaminants, including arsenic, uranium, lead and bacteria. Exposure to these toxins has been linked to illnesses from the innocuous -- an upset stomach -- to the deadly -- birth defects and cancer. Since 2000, no new chemicals have been added to the list of those that the EPA monitors under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal.

Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Government and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water, according to an analysis of government records by The New York Times.

If you receive your water from your local municipality, every year you should receive a Consumer Confidence Report in the mail detailing the so-called safety of that tap water. These reports also are available online for some cities and towns at through the EPA's Web site. These reports include information about any contaminants found in your local drinking water, and oftentimes, you'll read that the contaminants are within safe levels.

But that notion of safety is very misleading, as the New Times investigation details:

For instance, the drinking water standard for arsenic, a naturally occurring chemical used in semiconductor manufacturing and treated wood, is at a level where a community could drink perfectly legal water, and roughly one in every 600 residents would likely develop bladder cancer over their lifetimes, according to studies commissioned by the E.P.A. and analyzed by The Times. Many of those studies can be found in the Resources section of the New York Times.

That level of exposure is roughly equivalent to the risk the community would face if every person received 1,664 X-rays.