An international team of scientists has discovered a previously unknown compound prevalent in U.S. drinking water, raising concerns about potential public health risks.
This mysterious compound is called chlornitramide anion and is produced by the decomposition of inorganic chloramine. It is a disinfectant used to protect people from diseases such as typhoid and cholera, the researchers said. found in researchpublished Thursday in the journal Science.
According to the study authors, more than 113 million people in the United States alone, or about one-third of the country's population, drink chloramine-treated water, or water containing these disinfectants.
Although the toxicity of chlornitramide anion is still unknown, researchers have raised concerns about both its prevalence and similarity to other problematic substances.
“To be honest, we would expect its presence to some degree in all chlorinated drinking water because of its chemical properties,” said lead author David Warman, an environmental engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency, in the study. He spoke at a press conference prior to the publication of the book.
“There are similarities with other toxic molecules,” Wurman added.
The authors therefore emphasized that further research is urgently needed to assess whether this chemical poses a public health risk, and that simply identifying the compound is difficult.
“This compound is so small that we couldn't really break it down,” co-author Giuliana Razakowitz, a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, told a press conference. “The fragments that formed could not be detected by the mass spectrometer.”
However, by combining classical synthetic methods with advanced analytical techniques, including both high-resolution mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, scientists were able to finally isolate and identify the chloronitramide anion. I was able to do that.
They measured the concentration content of this compound in a series of chloramine-treated water systems in the United States and found levels as high as about 100 micrograms per liter. This exceeds the regulatory limits for most other disinfection byproducts, which range between 60 and 80 micrograms per liter.
The researchers also noticed that this compound was not present in water systems that use disinfectants other than chloramines.
Lead author Julian Fairley, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Arkansas, emphasized in a statement that even if the new compound is not toxic, there is still much knowledge to be gained from the study and future related research.
“Finding it will help us understand the pathways by which other compounds, including toxins, form. If we can know how something forms, we can control it. It could be possible,” Fairley added.
