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 .