“The first phase of a North Carolina State University water study on GenX is complete. Nearly every home whose tap water researchers tested last fall showed levels of GenX, and they found other perfluorinated chemicals as well. Meanwhile an environmental group in Washington has released a new map to learn more about bad drinking water across the country.

‘So we are here tonight to start to share the results from our GenX exposure study. We enrolled over 300 people in November. We collected blood and urine, and we collected tap water samples at people’s homes ……’

That’s Jane Hoppin. She’s the Deputy Director of the Center for Human Health and the Environment at N.C. State. She’s speaking to about 70 residents at UNCW’s Lumina Theater about the GenX study. Only the first part of the study is complete – the testing of tap water in peoples’ homes.

Last year, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences awarded Hoppin and her team of researchers a $275,000 grant. The purpose is to study the region’s contamination of GenX and 16 other fluorochemicals that researchers believe come from Chemours at the Fayetteville Works facility…

‘What we can see from this is that most of the samples that were from households that are serviced with water from the Cape Fear River had measurable levels of GenX. However the concentrations, the GenX concentrations in the samples were all below the 140 parts per trillion health value.’

While on the surface that sounds encouraging, researchers found other things as well…

EWG worked with Northeastern University in Boston to create an analysis and map of perfluorinated compound problem areas.

Phil Brown is a Professor of Health Sciences at Northeastern.

‘It became very clear very quickly that there were a lot of contamination episodes and the main reason we found them was not because government was reporting them but because they were reported by radio stations, by local newspapers, they were discovered by citizens groups, they were located and made public by very ordinary people who had no background in environmental health or political advocacy.’

Brown says that Wilmington’s leaders are discovering this is a state issue — not a federal one.”

Read the full article by Vince Winkel