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An estimated 99% of Americans have detectable PFAS in their blood, and even low concentrations in tap water can produce blood levels more than 100 times the drinking water concentration. 

Although researchers have yet to establish the exact extent of the harms such levels produce, state regulators signaled plans to cap concentrations in 2015 and put the first limits in place three years later.

“We knew that these standards had been put in place, and it’s now been almost 10 years,” said Hari Iyer, a lead author of the study and a cancer epidemiologist in the Department of Medicine, Rutger Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a member of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at Rutgers Cancer Institute, New Jersey’s only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, together with RWJBarnabas Health. “We wanted to see: was there any impact of these regulations on the actual levels in the water?”

Iyer’s team analyzed about 12,000 monitoring results for three PFAS  – PFOA, perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA) – from 47 community water systems serving about 45% of the state’s population. The data spanned 2006 to 2025. Using interrupted time-series analysis, the researchers compared post-regulation trends with what would have occurred without the policy change.

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(Source: Rutgers Today – March 25, 2026)