Fallon kids to get bottled water

Friday, Sept. 19, 2003 | 9:19 a.m.

Children in Fallon schools will receive bottled water to drink, paid for by $100,000 in federal funding secured by Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., in a spending bill passed earlier this week.

The senators designated the money to Families in Search of the Truth, a Nevada group made up of families of children with leukemia in Fallon, to purchase the bottled water.

Right now Churchill County schools receive municipal water with arsenic levels 10 times more than what is considered safe. Since 1997, 16 cases of childhood leukemia have been diagnosed in Fallon, 60 miles east of Reno.

Federal research done earlier this year failed to pinpoint a cause for the leukemia cluster, but scientists did find amounts of arsenic and tungsten in the drinking water warranted more studies.

The bill also included $9 million to build an arsenic treatment center, $225,000 for an independent study of the cancer cluster and $100,000 for private well water testing in Fallon.

The arsenic problem in Churchill County will get some relief based on funding passed in the federal spending bill earlier this week.

The U.S. Filter Co. will provide the water and donate a portion of the water and the costs to the project.

Nevada will also receive $1.5 million under a pilot program to help state health officials track and correlate chronic disease outbreaks like the cancer cluster in Nevada with possible environmental causes.