Yet, on a given day, half of the US population over the age of 2 years consumes sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB), which represents a significant source of daily calories ( Ogden et al. Tap water in the USA is readily available, regulated and monitored for safety, calorie-free, and low cost. Suggestions for reorienting language and scientific information in CCRs to be easily comprehensible to the public are offered. These findings expose a wide chasm that exists between current water quality reports and their effectiveness toward being understandable to US residents. The CCR readability ease was found to be equivalent to that of the Harvard Law Review journal. The analysis revealed that CCRs were written at the 11th–14th grade level, which is well above the recommended 6th–7th grade level for public health communications. Readability (or ‘comprehension difficulty’) was evaluated using Flesch–Kincaid readability tests. This study evaluated the readability of a nationally representative sample of 30 CCRs, released between 20. These reports have excellent potential for providing the public with accurate information on the safety of tap water, but there is a lack of research on the degree to which the information can be understood by a large proportion of the population. These reports encapsulate information regarding sources of water, detected contaminants, regulatory compliance, and educational material. This review attempts to synthesize the literature on environmental origin, distribution/occurrence, and effects and to catalyze a more focused discussion in the environmental science community.The United States Environmental Protection Agency mandates that community water systems (or water utilities) provide annual consumer confidence reports (CCRs) – water quality reports – to their consumers. Even though some PPCPs are extremely persistent and introduced to the environment in very high quantities and perhaps have already gained ubiquity worldwide, others could act as if they were persistent, simply because their continual infusion into the aquatic environment serves to sustain perpetual life-cycle exposures for aquatic organisms. As opposed to the conventional, persistent priority pollutants, PPCPs need not be persistent if they are continually introduced to surface waters, even at low parts-per-trillion/parts-per-billion concentrations (ng-microg/L). The possibility for continual but undetectable or unnoticed effects on aquatic organisms is particularly worrisome because effects could accumulate so slowly that major change goes undetected until the cumulative level of these effects finally cascades to irreversible change-change that would otherwise be attributed to natural adaptation or ecologic succession. Aquatic pollution is particularly troublesome because aquatic organisms are captive to continual life-cycle, multigenerational exposure. These compounds and their bioactive metabolites can be continually introduced to the aquatic environment as complex mixtures via a number of routes but primarily by both untreated and treated sewage. Another diverse group of bioactive chemicals receiving comparatively little attention as potential environmental pollutants includes the pharmaceuticals and active ingredients in personal care products (in this review collectively termed PPCPs), both human and veterinary, including not just prescription drugs and biologics, but also diagnostic agents, "nutraceuticals," fragrances, sun-screen agents, and numerous others. This spectrum of chemicals, however, is only one piece of the larger puzzle in "holistic" risk assessment. During the last three decades, the impact of chemical pollution has focused almost exclusively on the conventional "priority" pollutants, especially those acutely toxic/carcinogenic pesticides and industrial intermediates displaying persistence in the environment.
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