Access to clean, safe drinking water is so necessary to life that it should be considered a fundamental human right. Here in the United States it's also the law.

Yet, over the past five years, 20 percent of U.S. water treatment systems--including systems in all 50 states--violated the Safe Drinking Water Act and sent tap water laced with illegal concentrations of toxic chemicals, radioactive substances or dangerous bacteria into the homes, schools and offices of some 49 million Americans, according to a report by The New York Times.

Some of those violations were short-lived while others went on for years. Federal and state regulators were informed of each violation as it occurred, yet only 6 percent of the law-breaking water systems were ever fined or called to account in some way, according to millions of regulatory records examined by The Times.

Contaminated drinking water is linked to millions of illnesses in the United States every year--roughly 19 million cases annually are attributed to waterborne parasites, viruses and bacteria alone--but the full extent of the health hazard is impossible to determine in the short-term because many of the contaminants regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act are contributing factors diseases that are slow to develop, such as various types of cancer.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today confirmed that six greenhouse gases definitely pose a serious threat to public health and the welfare of the American people, and are subject to federal regulation under the Clean Air Act. The agency also concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from on-road vehicles are contributing to the threat.

The EPA's final endangerment finding--a direct response to the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act--is based on a comprehensive review of decades of scientific evidence and more than 380,000 public comments collected during the 60-day comment period that began in April when the agency issued its proposed finding.

In making the announcement, the EPA also issued a strong statement about greenhouse gases as the primary cause of climate change and their role as a contributing factor in hotter, longer heat waves and higher concentrations of ground-level ozone that lead to increases in respiratory illnesses and other health problems.

U.S. President Barack Obama has changed his Denmark travel itinerary and now plans to attend the final stages of the U.N.-sponsored climate conference in Copenhagen when the majority of world leaders will be there and when the most critical negotiations will take place.

Obama's earlier plan was to stop by the climate conference for a few hours on December 9, the third day of the 12-day conference, on his way to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, Obama will be attending the conference on December 18.

The schedule change is more significant than it may seem at first glance, because it is generally agreed that no effective global agreement on climate change is possible without U.S. leadership.

Obama has already announced provisional U.S. targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions--targets that won't become enforceable until Congress confirms them--so his decision to take an active part in negotiations at the international climate summit is being hailed as an important step toward a global climate treaty.

Consumer groups, food packaging companies and a wide range of manufacturers have been waiting for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to finish it's reevaluation of bisphenol A (BPA)--the plastics additive that has been linked to health problems ranging from cancer and diabetes to neurological disorders in children and sexual dysfunction in men--and either issue new safety standards that people can trust or ban the use of BPA altogether.

The FDA had set November 30 as the deadline to finish reviewing the available science on BPA and to announce its conclusions--but the deadline came and went with nothing more than a promise from the agency that its findings won't be delayed much longer. One FDA spokesman said on Monday that "it won't be 2010," which apparently means that the agency now plans to make an announcement before the end of December.