Public health groups kick off water campaign.

Close to 300 environmental, public health and consumer groups have joined together to kick off their “Campaign for Safe and Affordable Drinking Water,” to petition Congress to strengthen the nation’s drinking water regulations.

“[The coalition] is a much more multi-faceted organization of groups than has participated in drinking water issues when they’ve been up in Congress before,” says Joe Schwartz, associate policy director for Physicians for Social Responsibility, a coalition member. “One of the newer, more interesting aspects is the extent to which the public health groups have gotten organized and are participating in the campaign.”

The groups, ranging from the environmental U.S. Public Interest Research Group to the American Public Health Association to the National Consumers League, drew up a list of 12 principles they are trying to promote in Congress. The principles include:

* protect infants, children, pregnant women, elderly and other vulnerable people from drinking water contamination;

* strengthen health standards for drinking water;

* guarantee the public’s right to know what is in its drinking water;

* ensure safe water for all communities;

* prevent pollution at the source; make polluters pay their fair share for drinking water protection and cleanup;

* help communities pay to modernize old and unsafe water systems; and

* require water systems to show that they can comply with federal regulations and that their operators are competent.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a coalition member, launched the campaign with its report, “The Dirty Little Secret About Our Drinking Water.” Drawn from data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the report outlines more than 100 drinking water disease outbreaks in the United States from 1986 to 1994.

According to the report, the CDC estimates that, in the United States, 940,000 people are sickened, and 900 die from tainted tap water each year. EPA data in the report state that 47 million Americans — approximately one-fifth the country’s population — drink tap water with more than the EPA-approved level of micro-organisms.

In March 1993, a cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee’s water supply caused 400,000 sicknesses and 104 deaths. According to the NRDC report, EPA regulations currently do not require any monitoring of water systems for cryptosporidium.

The report also cites a CDC paper concluding that many more outbreaks occur than are reported since people often do not associate their illnesses with the drinking water.

“We can safely assume that there were many more than 116 waterborne disease outbreaks in the U.S. from 1986 to 1994,” the report says, “and that millions of Americans — most of whom will never know the source of their illness — became sick from drinking tap water.”

In the previous Congress, two different, more stringent versions of the Safe Drinking Water Act cleared both houses of Congress, but time ran out before the two bills could be reconciled.

Coalition members are concerned that the new, more conservative Congress will seek to extract rather than add teeth to the law.

“We didn’t think it was entirely unreasonable to expect [the previous Congress’ bill] would be the starting point for this year’s debate, but this past year’s deal is fast becoming a distant memory,” Schwartz says. “Based on what we’ve seen so far with legislation related to water, it’s hard to have a whole lot of confidence about the direction this Congress is going to go on drinking water issues.”

The “unfunded mandates” legislation already signed into law will curtail some water standards and mire future regulatory efforts in analytical and procedural red tape, according to the NRDC report.

“Our board is more interested in making sure we don’t back off the standards of the current law,” says Rich Gilbert, director of state and local affairs for the American Public Health Association. “Until we get a strong standard on cryptosporidium, we shouldn’t shy away from it.”

“[EPA Administrator Carol] Browner finally has acknowledged publicly that American drinking water is not as safe as she or the public has a right to expect,” Schwartz says.

“That’s not to say it’s a disaster, but a country as wealthy and technologically advanced as ours really should be able to do better.”