Mississippi Today
‘Forever chemicals’ in drinking water are worrying Mississippi residents

If Alabama’s experience foreshadows Mississippi’s future, expect the EPA to find plenty of toxic “forever chemicals” in the drinking water.
A 2022 map shows Alabama with plenty of drinking water exceeding the recommended limit for these chemicals, known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, kidney disease, liver problems, decreased immunity, and increased risk of asthma and thyroid issues.
Mississippians remain in the dark about these forever chemicals, however, because the state doesn’t test.
Anna Reade, senior scientist at the National Resource Defense Council, said testing is critical to keeping drinking water safe. “We can’t assume we don’t have exposure to PFAS unless we test,” she said. “Maine found high levels of PFAS in wells that had gone untested for two decades.”
Once hailed for producing items that could resist heat, stains or water, these chemicals are now considered a menace around the globe. Five nations have already agreed to a European ban on PFAS.
Such a ban would cover the thousands of different types of PFAS, which can be found in everything from non-stick cookware to dental floss. The most closely studied PFAS are perfluorooctanoic acid — PFOA — and perfluorooctanesulfonate — PFOS.
Rather than ban all PFAS, the EPA initially put health advisories on those two chemicals at 70 parts per trillion in drinking water, which have since been updated to well under 1 ppt for PFOA and for PFOS. EPA’s newly proposed regulation would limit them to 4 ppt each.
EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan is pushing to reduce current limits because of health problems associated with these chemicals. He said such a change would “prevent thousands of deaths and reduce tens of thousands of serious PFAS-related illnesses.”
A 2020 study suggests up to 200 million Americans are drinking forever chemicals beyond 1 part per trillion — a level that some experts have proposed as a safe limit for drinking water.
Les Herrington, director of Environmental Health for the state Department of Health, discounted the health risks to Mississippians. He pointed to EPA testing in 2013 and 2014, which “all produced results below detection limits and did not indicate potential concerns at that time.”
Recent testing by Consumer Reports, in collaboration with Mississippi Spotlight, however, raises questions about what might have happened since.
Consumer Reports tested 149 drinking municipal and well water samples in Mississippi’s 82 counties. Of those, 146 contained measurable levels of PFAS. Nearly a third of them exceeded EPA’s health advisory for PFOA in drinking water, and almost half exceeded the health advisory for PFOS.

Crystal Dotson, 39, of Corinth and her family saw their drinking water tested at 92.5 ppt in total PFAS, which is far beyond the level of 10 that Consumer Reports recommends. (The EPA has no recommendation on total PFAS, just PFOA and for PFOS.)
She wonders if the forever chemicals have played a role in the declining health of her family since they moved to the city of Corinth a decade ago.
Her 56-year-old husband, Tim, who was in good health, has now developed high blood pressure and polycystic kidney disease. Both hypertension and kidney disease have been linked to these forever chemicals.
Before moving to Corinth, he took blood pressure medicine. Now he’s allergic to that medicine and similar medication.
Their 17-year-old daughter, Stella, is now suffering from two auto-immune diseases, psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. A series of studies have found exposure to PFAS interfere with immune function.
Their 13-year-old daughter, Veda, had to visit a cardiologist because her heart rate and blood pressure were spiking. “They’re running all kinds of tests,” Dotson said.
She said she believes forever chemicals are playing a role in the decline of her family’s health. “You really feel helpless. Our kids are starting out life sick.”
In 2013, the city of Corinth began to get its drinking water from the Tennessee River via the Tenn-Tom Waterway.
Experts say PFAS can be found at oil refineries, water treatment plants, airports, military sites and a number of industrial sites. From there, the PFAS migrate into streams, landfills or other places before winding up in the soil and drinking water.
Tim believes his family, which also gets their drinking water from the Tennessee River, has been affected. “My brother-in-law has two types of cancer,” he said. “My sister has brain cancer. Everybody in my family has had cancer.”
Many states aren’t waiting for the EPA to act. Bills attacking the PFAS problem have been introduced in 35 states, including Georgia, Florida and Texas, according to Safer States. At least half have taken steps to regulate PFAS in drinking water or expand their monitoring. Mississippi isn’t one of them.
As for Dotson, she isn’t waiting. She plans to talk with the city of Corinth about these PFAS.
Since learning what was in their tap water, the Dotsons have started drinking from store-bought bottles, costing them about $15 a week.

Consumer Reports has identified four water filters, including two pitchers and two under-sink models, that can help consumers filter out forever chemicals.
Some systems, such as reverse osmosis, can cost thousands, which is more than many Mississippians can afford. Even if they can, they might not be able to install such a system, because a third of Mississippians, like the Dotsons, rent their homes.
Crystal hopes the family can convince their landlord to install a reverse osmosis system, she said. “We worry about our children. We want to help them.”
Kelly Hunter Foster, senior attorney for the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental advocacy organization, said a more ideal solution would be for states to prohibit the release of PFAS, “rather than try to filter them out on the back end. The public should not have to pay for the pollution that these companies create.”
Mississippi is one of at least 18 states that have sued PFAS manufacturers and distributors, saying they knew “these compounds were toxic” and sold them anyway. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, demands that they pay “to investigate, assess, remediate, monitor, and restore the sites in Mississippi” where PFAS were used. Minnesota settled with one manufacturer, 3M, for $850 million.
Mississippi’s lawsuit identifies these known sites as contaminated: Gulfport Combat Readiness Training Center, Gulfport Naval Construction Battalion Center, Keesler Air Force Base, Columbus Air Force Base, Key Field Air National Guard Base, Jackson Air National Guard Base and Naval Air Station Meridian.
Military bases typically use firefighting foam, which has historically contained PFAs. These forever chemicals can be found in many other places, including fast-food packaging. In a 2022 study, Consumer Reports found PFAS in packaging from every retailer tested.
“Additional investigation and testing will undoubtedly uncover further contamination across the State,” the lawsuit says.
In January 2022, Emmy Morrison and her husband bought their downtown Hattiesburg home.
They found water filters on the faucets because of the lead. She was stunned to find out the bigger problem was PFAS.
Thousands of these forever chemicals exist, but regulators test for only a handful of them.
“Unless you are controlling and testing for all those different types of PFAS, you’re missing major amounts of risk,” said Foster of the Waterkeeper Alliance. “When we look at samples we see some of the highest levels in the rare lesser types of PFAS.”
A decade ago, EPA officials tested for six forever chemicals in 80 of Mississippi’s drinking water systems. This year, they are testing for 29 chemicals in 239 water systems and will release the results here.
Consumer Reports tested for 43 chemicals. That is far short of the thousands of PFAS that exist.
Rather than attack PFAS as a class, the regulatory system in America “is stuck on a toxic treadmill,” said Reade of the National Resource Defense Council. “The EPA has taken a small step in the right direction to get off that treadmill.”
In contrast, the European Union is moving toward phasing out all PFAS, she said. “They’re attacking PFAS at their source. Here, we’re still approving new PFAS.”
The National Resource Defense Council is pushing to reduce “people’s exposure to PFAS,” she said. “We can’t make it zero, but we can definitely reduce their exposure and, therefore, their risk. We need to stop adding to the problem in the first place.”
In Morrison’s home, Consumer Reports found a total of 43.6 PFAS, which is four times more than Consumer Reports’ recommendation of 10.
That concerns the 62-year-old Morrison. “I’m glad I’m not young,” she said.
At least 2,000 people have filed litigation against DuPont, alleging that pollution from the plant has harmed their health, and juries have awarded millions in damages.
In 2005, the EPA uncovered evidence that DuPont had concealed the toxic effects of PFOA, and the company paid a $10.25 million fine, which the agency at the time called the largest environmental administrative penalty in its history.
In 1981, DuPont spotted PFOA in blood samples from pregnant workers in its plant in Washington, West Virginia, and at least one woman had transferred the chemical to her baby, according to the settlement. A decade later, the company learned that the forever chemical was in the public water supply.
DuPont said nothing, and in 2001, the EPA learned of the problem from an attorney working on class-action litigation on behalf of citizens in Ohio and West Virginia who had been affected by the chemical, according to the settlement.
As for House, testing showed total PFAS in her drinking water to be 20.7.
“We’ve got junk in the water,” she said. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”
Before the 74-year-old moved back to her hometown eight years ago, she had a reverse osmosis system for her drinking water in Tampa. Now back on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, she has no such system.
These days, she uses a refrigerator filter on the tap water she drinks. Now she wonders what she needs to do to be safe. “Do I need to bring Perrier from France?” she asked.
She is researching the matter, she said. “I didn’t come this far in life to want to come down with liver cancer.”
This investigation was conducted by Consumer Reports in partnership with Mississippi Spotlight, a collaboration between Mississippi Today, the Clarion Ledger and Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session
Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.
Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.
The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID.
The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots.
The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion.
Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor.
England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking.
The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber.
England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.
“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said.
Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting.
To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice.
Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures.
Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.
House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.
Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.
“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”
Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.
“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”
The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.
People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.
The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.
“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”
If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.
Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.
The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.
During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.
As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.
“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget
The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.
Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.
House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.
“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”
But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.
The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.
The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.
Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.
“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.
The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.
But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.
The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.
The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.
But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.
On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.
If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.
“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.
If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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