Guidelines for Canadian drinking water quality boron: International considerations (English, HTML)

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Publisher-reported update

2024-06-28

The World Health Organization (WHO), U.S. EPA, Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council and the European Commission have developed guidelines or advisory values for boron in drinking water (Table 6). WHO (2011), Australia (NHMRC and NRMCC, 2011) and the European Commission (2020) have set guidelines for boron in drinking water of 2.4, 4 and 1.5 to 2.4 mg/L, respectively. The U.S. EPA does not have a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for boron in drinking water but has established a non-enforceable lifetime health advisory of 5 mg/L (U.S. EPA, 2008). Health advisories serve as informal technical guidance for unregulated drinking water contaminants in the United States. All organizations' values used decreased rat body weights as the critical effect. The differences in the values are attributable to differences in uncertainty factors, allocation factors, body weights and use of BMD modelling versus the NOAEL approach.

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