Department of Biological Systems Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
Advanced Research Computing, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Dec 16;18(24):13254. doi: 10.3390/ijerph182413254.
Although the United States Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) theoretically ensures drinking water quality, recent studies have questioned the reliability and equity associated with community water system (CWS) service. This study aimed to identify SDWA violation differences (i.e., monitoring and reporting (MR) and health-based (HB)) between Virginia CWSs given associated service demographics, rurality, and system characteristics. A novel geospatial methodology delineated CWS service areas at the zip code scale to connect 2000 US Census demographics with 2006-2016 SDWA violations, with significant associations determined via negative binomial regression. The proportion of Black Americans within a service area was positively associated with the likelihood of HB violations. This effort supports the need for further investigation of racial and socioeconomic disparities in access to safe drinking water within the United States in particular and offers a geospatial strategy to explore demographics in other settings where data on infrastructure extents are limited. Further interdisciplinary efforts at multiple scales are necessary to identify the entwined causes for differential risks in adverse drinking water quality exposures and would be substantially strengthened by the mapping of official CWS service boundaries.
尽管美国《安全饮用水法》（SDWA）从理论上确保了饮用水质量，但最近的研究对与社区供水系统（CWS）服务相关的可靠性和公平性提出了质疑。本研究旨在确定弗吉尼亚州 CWS 之间的 SDWA 违规差异（即监测和报告（MR）和基于健康的（HB）），考虑到相关服务人口统计学、农村地区和系统特征。一种新颖的地理空间方法以邮政编码规模描绘了 CWS 的服务区域，将 2000 年美国人口普查数据与 2006-2016 年的 SDWA 违规情况联系起来，并通过负二项式回归确定了显著关联。服务区域内的美国黑人比例与 HB 违规的可能性呈正相关。这项工作支持了进一步调查美国特别是在获得安全饮用水方面的种族和社会经济差异的必要性，并提供了一种地理空间策略，以探索其他基础设施范围数据有限的环境中的人口统计学情况。需要在多个尺度上进行进一步的跨学科努力，以确定导致不良饮用水质量暴露的差异风险的交织原因，如果能绘制官方 CWS 服务边界，这将大大加强这项工作。
