Do you have any idea what's in your drinking water? Or what to do about it?
If you think so, better check your story against the latest findings of an alarming new study by the U.S. Geological Survey whose teams have been testing the drinking water intakes of urban water systems across the U.S. You won't be feel so good about turning on your tap water when you find out.
What USGS has discovered is a new wave of chemical compounds that scientists describe as raising disturbing new risks for human health. If you really want to learn about these new dangers, take a look at the video of "Poisoned Waters," which is running live on the PBS Frontline web page: www.pbs.org/frontline/poisonedwaters.
But for a quick gist of what's to come, listen to this. The evidence is that today's growing environmental threat to America's waterways comes not from the giant industrial polluters of old, but from chemicals in consumer products - face creams, toothpaste, deodorants, prescription medicines and household cleaners that find their way into sewers, storm drains, and eventually into drinking water.
The U.S. Geological Survey has gone coast to coast, documenting these new contaminants, known as endocrine disrupters because they disrupt the way the body's systems work, in the source waters for urban drinking water systems.
USGS scientists like Vicki Blazer report that endocrine disrupters are causing mass fish kills, male fish with female eggs in their gonads, frogs with six legs and other weird mutations. To public health specialists like Dr. Robert Lawrence of Johns Hopkins University, these mutations are "the modern canary in the mine that we haven't been paying enough attention to."
Millions of people, asserts Lawrence, are being exposed to endocrine disruptors from environmental waters "and we don't know precisely how many of them are going to develop premature breast cancer, going to have problems with reproduction, going to have all kinds of congenital anomalies of the male genitalia - things that are happening at a broad low level so that they don't raise the alarm in the general public."
"We can show that people with higher levels of some of these chemicals may have a higher incidence" of disease and such harmful effects such as lower male sperm count, adds Linda Birnbaum, Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. "In most cases, we don't know what the safe levels are."
Using Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound as case studies, the PBS program "Poisoned Waters" examines how these emerging pollutants along with old industrial contaminants like PCBs and mercury, and manure runoff from concentrated hog, cattle and chicken growing farms, have kept America's waterways in great peril and are exposing humans to rising health risks.
Some scientists argue that America needs to change its strategy and its laws. Instead of waiting for science to prove chemicals are dangerous, they say, industry should have to prove they are safe, before using them. Think about that the next time you turn on your tap.
Hedrick Smith is Correspondent and Senior Producer for "Poisoned Waters," showing on PBS Frontline April 21, at 9 pm.