Drinking Water Contribution to Aggregate Perchlorate Intake of Reproductive-Age Women in the U.S.

Estimated by Dietary Intake Simulation and Analysis of Urinary Excretion Data

Categorized Under: Environment, Health, Scientific + Engineering Analysis

Published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, advance online publication September 23, 2009, by Bill Mendez, Beth Dederick, and Jonathan Cohen of ICF International. This article summarizes the results of a project for the American Water Works Association. In this paper, ICF derives simulation (Monte Carlo) estimates of dietary perchlorate intake distributions for reproductive-age women, which include explicit contributions from drinking water, and compares them to estimates based on urinary excretion.

Perchlorate concentrations in water were estimated based on measurements from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's UCMR1 database, and from other regional studies of perchlorate contamination. We find that including the drinking water contributions in the dietary simulations yields increases in the population's geometric mean perchlorate intake of 3–8 percent, with a conservative maximum of about 24 percent, compared to intakes estimated based on food intake alone.

Authored By

Dr. Jonathan Cohen
Senior Technical SpecialistICF International

Dr. Jonathan Cohen has 27 years of experience in statistics and data analysis. Before joining ICF, he was an Assistant Professor of Statistics for seven years at the Universities of Minnesota and Kentucky.

Dr. Cohen has managed diverse projects in statistical theory and its applications to the statistical data analysis of environmental land, air, and water quality and emissions data. He is skilled in regression analysis, general linear models and mixed models, dose-response modeling, spatial analysis, nonparametric statistics, censored data analysis, database management, applied probability, Bayesian modeling, and statistical simulation. Dr. Cohen is an adjunct instructor of mathematics at Santa Rosa Junior College. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Imperial College, London.
Dr. Bill Mendez
Senior FellowICF International

Dr. Bill Mendez has more than 30 years’ experience in scientific consulting and project management. He has expertise in toxicology, environmental chemistry, human health risk assessment, statistical analysis, and environmental policy evaluation. He supports the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Center for Environmental Assessment (NCEA) and its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program. He is participating in a cancer and noncancer risk assessment for inorganic arsenic and in the development of the IRIS Toxicological Review for cadmium.

He was the Lead Scientist on the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards’ (OAQPS’) quantitative risk assessment in support of revisions to the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for Lead.