Hari Iyer

Once water is ingested into the body, the concentration in the water can be magnified by orders of magnitude.

And so while I don't know if I have a precise answer of what contribution water is, it is certainly a very important one.

And because of this biological magnification effect, it's still a major area that we want to control.

That's a great question.

I can speak a bit more to the health side than the sort of consumption side.

So on the health side, I think what has started to become more evident is that the water passes through your body and usually gets filtered in the kidney and liver.

And so those are the organs where some of the sort of best established emerging evidence on a health impact seems to be.

So kidney function and risk of certain kidney cancers have been linked to these PFAS exposures.

And a lot of liver enzyme levels that sometimes you get monitored at the doctor's office, those seem to be elevated in people who have high consumption of these chemicals.

And so some of what we're doing at the Cancer Institute and other places is now trying to understand those elevated levels.

Are they being linked now to these downstream cancer outcomes and other chronic disease outcomes?

I'm glad you asked that question because it turns out that there were a lot of actions that we observed when we were reviewing these data, actions taken by water systems in anticipation of the policies coming into place.

Some examples of some of those actions are

identifying wells that have really excess levels and then just pulling them offline.

So they're no longer going to be serving people at their home.

Another example is like kind of what you had just asked about, which are granulated activated carbon.

It allows us to kind of identify these PFAS chemicals, catch them and remove them from the water.

So post-treatment, those levels are no longer as high.

So no, no.

In this context, what I was referring to is that often water that is provided from different systems, they will have their own wells that are sources of water that then gets kind of transferred.