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This article examines the history of risk assessments of the organophosphate pesticide chlorpyrifos at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), especially after a ban on household uses in 2000. Federal funding enabled more noncorporate and place-based scientific investigations of this pesticide’s harms, including child-cohort epidemiology of populations impacted through environmental injustices. This article argues, first, that their findings challenged the thin knowledge base, mostly from corporate-sponsored toxicology, that originally justified chlorpyrifos’s continued use. Second, for decades, outside a court-induced interval in 2015–2016, EPA’s risk assessments favored “de-placed” toxicological modes and standards of knowledge—forged in the controlled environment of experimental laboratories—while marginalizing science gathered from the actual places and people EPA is supposed to protect. Third, agency officials stuck with a quantifiable, laboratory- and modeling-centered calculus for assessing health risks in part because a united front of corporate and corporate-consultant scientists harped on the uncertainties of newer findings. The article concludes that the agency needs to rethink its risk assessment practices and dependence, as well as more effectively account for financial conflicts of interest in evaluations of policy-relevant science. ( Am J Public Health. 2025;115(7):1074–1084. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2025.308073 ) 

It is vital that the next generation of public health practitioners understand the importance of ensuring affordable and equitable access to safe drinking water for all communities, and the interconnected roles that scientific research, public policy, community engagement, and advocacy play in ensuring this. Here, we describe the Water Tool, a website where student-users develop an exploratory and customizable journey through data on drinking water suppliers’ compliance with regulations, watershed pollution, and environmental justice:https://eew-sdwa-nj.streamlit.app/In the course we built alongside a New Jersey-specific version of the Water Tool, students complete three in-class assignments and a final project. They first use it to answer a basic set of questions such as, how many public water systems are there in the state? Students then find their own water provider through an interactive map and describe the provider’s source water and number of persons served. Next, they use the tool to investigate socioeconomic, biophysical, and public health indicators of environmental inequity in their area. In the final project, students reflect on the meaning of the information they compiled and how to communicate it. Through hands-on engagement with data and structured opportunities for reflection, the Water Tool enables students to learn both about how drinking water is regulated and how to assess information on drinking water quality for specific water systems. Although we designed the tool and assignments specifically with New Jersey in mind, it could be reconfigured for use in other states or more local contexts.