Roy speaks from recent personal experience, having spent months as the communications director for – a site that, under the direction of Marc Edwards, the Charles Lunsford Professor of civil and environmental engineering, sought to inform Flint, Michigan, residents about the city’s lead contamination after switching its water source.Ĭurrently, water quality reports are not required to have a single main message. Ask straight, pointed questions about information that seems hard to understand.' If you don’t understand it, call your water utility and have them explain. 'Please read your annual report,' Roy said. Phetxumphou began working with Davy through Virginia Tech’s Water INTERface Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program, and so did co-author Siddhartha Roy of Palanpur, India, a doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering. student in civil and environmental engineering and lead author on the paper. 'The goal is to inform people about their drinking water and whether water is safe to drink,' said Katherine Phetxumphou of Woodbridge, Virginia, a Ph.D. This message should then be followed by possible actions to take, such as calling water providers to learn more about testing, regulatory requirements, and potential risk.

According to the researchers, these reports should begin by directly stating whether water is safe to drink according to state and federal regulations. One component of the index suggests materials contain a main message, which is meant to inform people of an overall health message. This index is designed for writers to ensure public health materials are written with plain everyday language for broad public audiences. She and her team, including corresponding author Andrea Dietrich, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering, analyzed the samples based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Clear Communication Index. The goal of the reports is to communicate where water comes from, what’s in it, and whether it meets state and federal safety regulations.ĭavy’s concern originally grew from not understanding her report when she received it in the mail in 2014. public water systems should receive a report by mail or online. 'We are concerned about whether people are drinking enough water if they don’t understand these reports,' said Brenda Davy, a professor of human nutrition, foods and exercise in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, a core faculty member in the Virginia Tech Water INTERface Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program, and a Fralin Life Science Institute affiliated researcher in the Fralin Translational Obesity Research Center.Įach year by July 1, people purchasing water from U.S.

In it, the team found that a national sample of Consumer Confidence Reports fails to communicate important information because the reports use complicated language and sophisticated data tables.Īs a result, people are left to determine on their own if their water is safe to drink according to state and federal safety regulations. The suggestion comes from its recent study published in the Journal of Water and Health. A Virginia Tech research team suggests that annual water quality reports should more directly answer this question in order to build people’s confidence in and education about their drinking water.

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