Two-year study to look at water quality in South Texas colonias, health risks

Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas Inc. and the Texas A&M University School of Public Health announced Wednesday a two-year study of arsenic and other toxic contaminants occurring in residential drinking water in Rio Grande Valley colonias. According to a release, the event underscored a new partnership between the university and the nonprofit, a partnership that aims to address and reduce health disparities in underserved and low-resourced populations on the Texas border that depend on unsafe drinking water sources. “According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, in just six Texas counties along the Texas-Mexico border, 38,000 colonia residents do not have access to clean drinking water,” Jaime Wesolowski, President & CEO of Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, wrote. “Clean and safe water is an essential component to good health. We are proud that through this partnership with Texas A&M, we will be helping these vital communities safeguard their water and health, ensuring they all have an opportunity to thrive.”

The goal, the release said, is to test and capture measurements of existing health risks of exposure to water contaminants, develop solutions to reduce the risk of exposure for near contaminated water and collect valuable data for the community that can be used to find solutions and train the next generation of citizen scientists in South Texas. “Through this partnership with Methodist Healthcare Ministries, we are helping Texas take a big step forward ensuring everyone in South Texas has access to a fundamental need for good health: clean and reliable drinking water,” Greg Hartman, senior vice president and chief operating officer at Texas A&M University, wrote. The release details the objectives of the Arsenic Surveillance in Border Communities’ Drinking Water project, among them evaluating the burden of arsenic exposure in drinking water, evaluating nutritional status and to predict health impacts of chronic exposure and assessing the impact of an intervention to reduce exposure using tabletop pitchers. The project will study households in four colonias and compare them to households outside of colonias, the focus being in Hidalgo County. “Arsenic exposure from contaminated drinking water increases the risks of diverse cancers and non-cancer diseases,” said Taehyun Roh, assistant professor at Texas A&M School of Public Health. “Underserved and low-resourced populations relying on unsafe drinking water sources in Texas border communities are disproportionately affected by this. We expect our study will contribute to reducing health disparities in these communities.”