(The Hill) – An international team of scientists finally identified a mystery chemical prevalent in U.S. drinking water, sparking concerns about potential public health risks.
The compound, called “chloronitramide anion,” forms from the decomposition of inorganic chloramines — disinfectants used to safeguard people from diseases like typhoid and cholera, the researchers said in a study, published Thursday in Science.
NBC News reported that the chemical was first detected about 40 years ago, but with the help of advanced tools, scientists were recently able to identify it.
In the United States alone, more than 113 million people, or about a third of the country’s population, drink chloraminated water, or water that contains these disinfectants, according to the study authors.
While the toxicity of chloronitramide anion is still unknown, the researchers expressed alarm about both its prevalence and its similarities to other problematic substances.
“Its presence is expected, quite honestly, in all chlorinated drinking waters to some extent, because of the chemistry,” senior author David Wahman, an environmental engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency, said during a press call prior to the article’s publication.
“It has similarity to other toxic molecules,” Wahman added.
The authors therefore emphasized an urgent need for further research to evaluate whether the chemical poses a public health risk, stressing that merely identifying the compound was a challenge.
“Because this compound’s so small, we couldn’t really break it apart,” said co-author Juliana Laszakovits, a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, in the press call. “The fragments that formed weren’t able to be detected by the mass spectrometer.”
But by combining classic synthesis methods with advanced analytical techniques, including both high-resolution mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry, the scientists were ultimately able to isolate and identify chloronitramide anion.
They measured the compound’s concentration content in a range of chloraminated U.S. water systems, detecting levels as high as about 100 micrograms per liter — surpassing most regulatory limits for other disinfection by-products, which hover between 60 and 80 micrograms per liter.
The researchers also noticed that the compound was absent from water systems that use disinfectants other than chloramines.
Lead author Julian Fairey, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Arkansas, stressed in a statement that even if the new compound is not toxic, there is much knowledge to gain from their study and future related research.
“Finding it can help us understand the pathways for how other compounds are formed, including toxins,” Fairey added. “If we know how something is formed, we can potentially control it.”
Nexstar’s Ashleigh Jackson contributed to this story.