Search

This article reviews the regulation of lead in drinking water, highlighting its epidemiological, engineering, and ethical aspects with a focus on the Flint water crisis. We first discuss water quality policy and its implementation with a focus on lead contamination of water, primarily from pipe systems between a water treatment facility and a tap. We then discuss physicians' roles and ethical responsibilities regarding safe drinking water using a human rights framework. We argue that physicians can play an important role in safeguarding drinking water in their communities by being vigilant, honoring the community's trust in them, and warning, educating, and empowering patients and broader communities so as to protect tap water safety and public health., (© 2017 American Medical Association. All Rights Reserved.)

Water scarcity is intensified by drought, a phenomenon that impacts many sectors of society and affects virtually all climate zones. The Palmer drought indices are widely used by scientists and policy makers to understand drought and model its components. Despite the spatial heterogeneity and variability in variables required by the Palmer model, regional index values are most commonly used for real-time drought assessment. Local stakeholders charged with developing flexible and tailored water management policies have articulated the need for drought indices calculated at finer spatial resolutions than a regional scale. We use the Pacific Northwest United States (U.S.) as a study area to demonstrate the differences between drought indices calculated for U.S. climate divisions with those calculated at a 0.5° by 0.5° latitude/longitude resolution. Our results indicate that regional values of the two cumulative Palmer drought indices do not represent finer-resolution values well. For half of the study area, the pictures of drought (as determined by regional and finer-resolution values) are drastically different more than 30% of the time. Thus, quite often water managers do not have a clear understanding of the relative severity of drought in their area, which can have serious implications for drought mitigation and adaptation.