Many Australians were nurtured on the belief that their drinking water was the world’s best. Occasionally, their faith was rattled by debates over chlorination and fluoridation, but it now emerges we’ve been drinking tap water turned toxic by so-called forever chemicals.

There are now calls for urgent testing following US warnings they are no safe levels of perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in drinking water and were likely to be carcinogenic. The World Health Organisation’s cancer agency has even gone a step further, classifying PFOA as category one carcinogen.

The Herald’s award-winning journalist Carrie Fellner reports that after the Biden administration dramatically lowered its safe limits for drinking water in April following a crusade led by a young woman against forever chemicals, some Australians are likely to have been exposed via suburban drinking water supplies across Sydney and dozens of other locations across Australia.

Testing to date indicates the drinking water supplies of some 1.8 million Australians had been contaminated by forever chemicals. A government-funded 2011 University of Queensland study sampled tap water 34 locations and discovered the chemicals at North Richmond, Quakers Hill, Liverpool, Blacktown, Emu Plains and Campbelltown, along with the NSW regional centres of Bathurst, Wagga Wagga, Lithgow, Gundagai and Yass.

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More lately, high-level pollution by the PFOS or PFOA has been found in drinking water in the Sydney suburb of North Richmond, Newcastle and Jervis Bay, Rottnest Island, Norfolk Island and in a string of towns across Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, the Northern Territory.

Over the same timeframe, as Australian water providers stayed in the dark, the Wall Street giant 3M agreed to pay out a historic $19 billion settlement to clean up thousands of water supplies across the US, having known about the health risk of its products since the late 1990. Meanwhile, the Australian government had been tied up in court defending lawsuits over use of forever chemicals in a firefighting foam manufactured by 3M; the Department of Defence is already contemplating suing the company, after reaching class action settlements worth $366 million to compensate 11 Australian communities polluted with forever chemicals.

However, the source of the contamination in Australia’s drinking water is unclear as many affected locations are not near Defence sites.

Nicholas Chartres, a senior research fellow from the University of Sydney’s faculty of medicine and health, said Australians should be concerned about potential health effects from any detection of forever chemicals in their drinking water. And Mariann Lloyd-Smith, a toxic chemicals campaigner who has served on United Nations expert committees, slammed it as a “national disgrace” that PFOA is now permitted in Australia’s tap water at 140 times the maximum level the US.