Abstract
The United States Environmental Protection Agency monitors contaminants in drinking water and consolidates these results in the National Contaminant Occurrence Database. Our objective was to assess the co-occurrence of metal contaminants (total chromium, hexavalent chromium, molybdenum, vanadium, cobalt, and strontium) over the years 2013–2015. We used multilevel Tobit regression models with state and water system-level random intercepts to predict the geometric mean of each contaminant occurring in each public water system, and estimated the pairwise correlations of predicted water system-specific geometric means across contaminants. We found that the geometric means of vanadium and total chromium were positively correlated both in large public water systems (r = 0.45, p < 0.01) and in small public water systems (r = 0.47, p < 0.01). Further research may address the cumulative human health impacts of ingesting more than one contaminant in drinking water.
Highlights
Health 2021, 18, 7884. https://There are several heavy metals found in United States drinking water that are naturally occurring and, human activities can increase the concentrations available, fully eliminating these exposures from the environment is impossible [1,2,3]
There was a high correlation between total chromium and hexavalent chromium in public water systems (r = 0.984, p < 0.01)
The most noteworthy positive correlations were between total chromium and vanadium (r = 0.474, p = < 0.01) and between hexavalent chromium and vanadium (r = 0.498, p = < 0.01)
Summary
There are several heavy metals found in United States drinking water that are naturally occurring and, human activities can increase the concentrations available, fully eliminating these exposures from the environment is impossible [1,2,3]. Research has shown that some heavy metals may cause negative health effects, such as cancers and kidney, liver, and neurological damage [9,10]. Understanding which metals pose health risks when ingested, and at what doses, is a priority for environmental health practitioners. Human populations are exposed to a mixture of metals with uncertain implications for human health [9,10]. The United States has a surveillance system in place for these contaminants and they store multiple years of data in the National Contaminant Occurrence Database [11]
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