Resource Pages

Apr 11, 2022

Unsafe levels of URANIUM have been detected in two-thirds of public drinking water in the US with those in the Midwest and South most at-risk

Researchers at Columbia University found that two-thirds of US drinking water systems have elevated levels of uranium
  • Around 90% of Americans use community drinking water systems, making this a wide-reaching problem in the U.S.
  • Hypertension, cardiovascular disease, kidney damage, and lung cancer have all been tied to uranium exposure
  • Elevated levels of arsenic, barium, chromium, selenium were found in many drinking water systems around the country as well
  • Researchers, who published their findings at the start of the month in The Lancet Planetary Healthy, gathered data from 2000-2011 for the study, reviewing recorded metal levels from nearly 38,000 sites.

Levels of antimony, arsenic, barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, mercury, selenium, thallium, and uranium were studied.

They found elevated levels of uranium across the country, with researchers nothing that semi-urban and Hispanic communities were most at risk of being exposed to the contaminated water.

In total, nearly two-thirds of sites tested had some sort of uranium contamination.