Carcinogens public health impact

The unacceptable taste and odor of drinking water from a tributary of the upper Ohio River led Frank Middleton and his collaborators in the U.S. Public Health Service to apply their granular carbon extraction-chloroform elution procedure to obtain residue samples of that water in 1962 (2). The first preliminary suggestions that such residues were carcinogenic were presented by Hueper and Payne (3) the following year. For whatever reason, those observations appeared to have had little impact. 

As indicated in other studies (Infras, 1995 Ecoplan, 1996 UNIPEDE, 1996), these costs are typical for European cities and concern especially public health and materials. They do not include other impacts like olfactory discomfort from VOCs, long-term effects like risk of mutagen and carcinogen diseases. 

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