Lab Matters Fall 2017 | Page 11

feature learned about the village’ s tainted tap water, they had the exact kinds of questions biomonitoring is designed to answer:“ Are we contaminated [ with PFOA ]? …. If it’ s in the water, and we’ ve been drinking it, are we exposed?”

New York State offered to test everyone in the village and outlying area. And Aldous secured CDC approval to utilize Wadsworth’ s high-tech, CDC-funded, public health emergency preparedness laboratory, part of a nationwide network of surge capacity labs, collectively known as the Laboratory Response Network for Chemical Threats( LRN-C).

Wadsworth scientists immediately set about devising a high-throughput method to measure PFOA in blood, using liquid chromatography / tandem mass spectrometry with 96-well plate sample prep. Over the following months, the NYS DOH collected specimens from about 2,900 people. Unsurprisingly, given the US background exposure documented by NHANES, almost all tested positive for the compound. More concerning, the geometric mean level for specimens from people served by village water was significantly above national background levels.

Community Outreach Key to Biomonitoring

All of those interviewed for this article agree that the need for biomonitoring is likely to grow, as the extent of existing environmental health threats becomes better understood and new threats arise.

Already, companies like DuPont are using a new compound, GenX, in place of the PFOA they once used to make Teflon TM, stain-resistant carpeting and other household products. The problem is, the limited data thus far available suggest GenX is associated with some of the same health problems as PFOA, including cancer.

Yet despite the multiplying threats, funding for biomonitoring remains scarce.( See sidebar.)

Perhaps the biggest booster has been CDC, which has funded state biomonitoring efforts since 2001, when the agency awarded planning grants to 25 state and regional programs, supporting 33 states in all.“ The purpose of those awards was to task states with developing plans for what they would do with larger implementation grants,” said Romanoff. But after 9 / 11, the follow-up funding never made it through Congress. Instead, CDC cobbled together some of its own core revenue to compete just three new awards, running from 2003-2007.

“ These were smaller awards,” said Romanoff.“ The mass spectrometry [ biomonitoring ] platform is incredibly expensive. We were just not able to do what we really hoped for.”

Then, in 2009, with dedicated funding for state biomonitoring, CDC competitively awarded California, New York and Washington full implementation grants, totaling $ 5 million / year for five years. And the agency currently supports nine states with six awards.

One of those programs is based at the New Hampshire Public Health Laboratories, where scientists are examining levels of arsenic and uranium in 500 private well water users, their well water and a comparison group of 50 public water users.

New Hampshire’ s groundwater is known to be at risk for elevated arsenic, owing to two sources of the heavy metal: New England’ s granite bedrock geology and past use of arsenic-laced pesticides on local orchards and farmland. Only

Yet Hoosick Falls was not an isolated incident. Elevated levels of PFOA were confirmed in the water supply of nearby Petersburgh, NY( about 90 ppt), and in private well water in North Bennington, VT( up to 2,880 ppt), both incidents associated with local manufacturing plants. And another PFC, PFOS( present in the foams used to suppress aircraft fires), was detected in:

• Lake Washington, the water source for Newburgh, NY( about 150 ppt).( Nearby Stewart Air National Guard Base has since been declared a Superfund site, with PFOS levels as high as 5,900 ppt.)

• Well water supplying New Hampshire’ s Pease International Tradeport, the site of the former Pease Air Force Base.

Because Vermont and New Hampshire had no capability to test for PFCs in human tissues at the time, Wadsworth took on the bulk of the biomonitoring for all of these incidents, ultimately testing about 7,500 specimens, so far.

Funding for biomonitoring comes from five key sources.

1. CDC’ s National Center for Environmental Health currently supports nine states— California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Virginia and the states comprising the Four Corners Biomonitoring Consortium( Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah)— with biomonitoring grants collectively totaling $ 5 million annually.

2. The US Environmental Protection Agency funds CDC’ s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to implement the Biomonitoring of Great Lakes Populations program, which assesses exposure to legacy and emerging contaminants in susceptible populations in the Great Lakes Basin. Currently, the program funds studies at Health Research, Inc./ NY State Department of Health and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

3. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Children’ s Health Exposure Analysis Resource( CHEAR) funds a network of one state laboratory( New York’ s Wadsworth Center), one nonprofit laboratory( Research Triangle Institute) and four academic laboratories to test children’ s specimens associated with National Institutes of Health biomonitoring studies.

4. Emergency state funding is sometimes available for biomonitoring after high-profile disasters, such as the 2015 breach at Colorado’ s Gold King Mine, which released over 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Animas River.

5. At least two states— California and Minnesota— have legislatively-mandated state biomonitoring programs, whose funding varies from year to year.