March 15, 2000

Dr. Yi Wang
Pesticide and Environmental Toxicology Section
Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
California Environmental Protection Agency
1515 Clay Street, 16th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612

Dear Dr. Wang:

The Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) appreciates the opportunity to submit comments on the Proposed Public Health Goals for 12 Chemicals in Drinking Water. ACWA includes nearly 450 public water suppliers in California. Our members serve more than 90 percent of the delivered water in California for domestic, agricultural and industrial uses.

ACWA would once again like to commend the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) for its outreach efforts during the development of the Public Health Goals (PHGs). The public workshop and personal meetings helped bring considerable insight to our review of the PHGs.

ACWA is, however, concerned that the University of California peer review documents were not available for public review until only a few days before the public comment deadline. Usually, a document or regulation subject to public comment undergoes peer review prior to publication for comment. We realize that OEHHA is not required to have the PHGs peer reviewed and we appreciate OEHHA's efforts to accomplish this. However, the current process of simultaneous peer review and public comment does not allow the public the benefit of reviewing these independent, thrid party documents. It is requested that future PHGs undergo peer review and revision prior to the public comment period and the peer review documents should be part of the docket for public review.

While all of the PHGs proposed are important to drinking water providers, we do not have the time or the resources to complete detailed technical reviews of all 12 documents. Thus, we have focussed our efforts on the three constituents that are of major significance to drinking water suppliers and two of which, in our judgement, aluminum and uranium, need major revisions. Attached are technical reviews and detailed comments on aluminum, uranium and tetrachloroethylene (PCE).

While the key points of our comments are highlighted below, it is requested that OEHHA review and give full consideration to our attached detailed comments.

Aluminum

• The considerable public health benefits of using aluminum compounds for drinking water treatment to prevent waterborne diseases should be given weight in OEHHA's assessment, just as consideration is given to essentiality of other chemicals as dietary nutrients.
• The primary study used by OEHHA to develop the PHG uses unrealistically high aluminum dosages, outdated lab techniques to arrive at erroneously high serum aluminum levels, and, as pointed out by a UC peer review, does not measure any pharmacologic or toxicologic adverse effect but simply an increase of a foreign substance.
• The available science on aluminum is not sufficient nor adequate for the purpose of setting a health-based limit.
• OEHHA should use the flexibility provided by the Legislature in Health and Safety Code Section 116365(c)(6) for dealing with "insufficient currently available scientific data" and set the PHG at 1 mg/l. This is consistent with the previous State finding that 1 mg/l is safe and protective of public health with an adequate margin of safety for sensitive subpopulation groups.
• A recent paper by Martyn et. al. (1997) discounts any associated link between Alzheimer's and aluminum, which refutes their own earlier study.

Uranium

• It is inappropriate for OEHHA to use the 1998 Health Canada study in the uranium PHG calculation because:

a) the relative uranium exposures from all sources is not known,
b) the exposed population is small, unique and is not characteristic of California,
c) the study contained no zero-exposed control group,
d) the changes noted are not scientifically linked to actual adverse effects, and
e) the effects of measurement error were not considered.

• The PHG for uranium should be developed in conjunction with the other radionuclides regulated in drinking water due to the unique and related nature of these contaminants.
• The PHG for uranium should be delayed until the USEPA completes its risk assessment for uranium and other radionuclides. USEPA is set to release a Notice of Data Availability this spring for many radionuclides, including uranium, that may prove beneficial to OEHHA in finalizing this PHG.
• If OEHHA proceeds to establish the PHG for uranium at this time, it should base the calculation of the PHG on the Gilman et al (1998) study. However, OEHHA should follow the international consensus conclusions from the 1998 USEPA workshop on uranium, in which OEHHA participated, regarding use of this study for calculating a public health goal.

Tetrachloroethylene (PCE)

• OEHHA should include two recently released, relevant studies, mentioned by name in the attached technical review, in the PHG document.

On a final note, we spport OEHHA's efforts to develop "quantitative" numbers for the PHGs, rather than defaulting to zero as U.S. EPA does for all carcinogens.

If you have any questions about this letter or the enclosed information before you finalize the PHGs, please contact Krista Clark at 916-441-4545.

Sincerely,

Dan Smith
Manager of Regulatory Affairs

Attachments:

1. Aluminum
2. Uranium
3. Tetrachloroethylene