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The Johns Hopkins Northeast Regional Academic Environmental Public Health Center Technical Assistance and Consultation At the Northeast Regional Center, we believe that an integrated system for academic institutions to assist state and local health agencies offers opportunities to enhance workforce competency, build scientific capacity, and develop practical approaches to improving and evaluating the delivery of environmental public health services. To achieve this, we have actively engaged our state and local partners in collaborative efforts to conduct health hazard evaluations and investigations with regards to the arsenic contamination in the groundwater of several counties on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Arsenic is a known human carcinogen and ingestion of arsenic in drinking water has been associated with cancers of the bladder, lung, and skin. On the Eastern Shore, where groundwater is routinely used for residential drinking supply, the level of naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater routinely varies from 5 to 30 ug/l--often exceeding the recently revised maximum contaminant level (MCL) of 10 micrograms per liter promulgated in 2001 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act. However, regardless of the source of arsenic contamination, water containing arsenic contaminations in excess of the MCL requires treatment before it may be safely and legally supplied by municipal water companies as drinking water. Simply put, local environmental public health practitioners are not equipped to deal with the emerging threat of arsenic exposure for the nation's groundwater. Working at the request of local environmental public health practitioners on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, namely Dorchester County, Talbot County, and Queen Anne's County, Robin Streeter, a PhD student working with our Center, has been working on several projects. First, we are working to develop a technical report detailing the occurrence of arsenic in drinking well water based on available data, review the available epidemiological and toxicological studies, and describe the available point of use and point of entry treatment technologies available currently for arsenic remediation. Secondly, with assistance from Salisbury State student interns in the summer of 2004 and again this summer, we are working to enumerate and define the location of public and private wells on the Eastern Shore using global positioning system (GPS) technology. Ms. Streeter has also presented the data she has collected in numerous venues, most notably at the 2004 MDE State-County Ground Water Symposium and a Town Meeting in Queen Anne’s County on Arsenic Contamination in the Groundwater in December of 2004. All of these components have allowed the Center to assist state and local environmental public health practitioners in identifying accurate and effective methods to delineate arsenic occurrence in groundwater. These efforts are providing a framework for future research to explore the potential association between arsenic levels in groundwater used for drinking water supply and the occurrence of arsenic related cancers in Maryland residents living in this region. Return to main
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