Hari Iyer

Unfortunately, one of the limitations of our study is that it was really only looking at public water systems.

And so unfortunately, we're not able to demonstrate that this 55% reduction holds in people's home well systems because those don't tend to be tested as often.

And that's about one in 10 New Jersey residents, I believe, is served by their home well.

So unfortunately, there's been nationwide studies that have looked at levels over the last 15 years or so.

And yes, unfortunately, New Jersey has in the past had higher levels on average than other states.

However, given sort of the findings from this study, one would hope that in subsequent years when those national comparisons are done, that may not be the case.

That's a great question.

And that's something that we hope that other states can look to some of these successes.

But I think the power of doing something like this and being able to publish these findings is that it can lead to exactly what you're describing.

Best practices can be shared from states.

These experiments that are done at a local level, you can test some of the

You know, the kinks in the policy, maybe it works well in certain contexts, but not others.

Maybe it's addressing certain populations and not others.

And those best practices can be shared to ultimately make, you know, our water, drinking water safer for everybody.

So I've been studying prostate cancer since my doctoral training.

And one of the biological pathways that drives prostate cancer is sex hormone disruption.

And so endocrine disrupting chemicals have long been thought of as a potential risk factor, but there's been very few human epidemiologic studies that have robustly demonstrated this, have replicated in different populations.

So when I moved to New Jersey to start my job as an assistant professor here, one of the first things I did was talk to environmental health scientists at our university who have been studying not just forever chemicals, but lead levels.

And I think it was really through conversations with them, learning more about the state, learning more about some of the health challenges there.

that I became aware of it.