“Mostly in coffee,” she said with a laugh.
It’s a small but important sign that the Silent Spring Institute research scientist is confident in the work Barnstable town officials have done to cut the amount of dangerous chemicals within the municipal water supply.
But before town officials recognized the problem more than five years ago, people across Hyannis were drinking the contaminated water.
Now, Schaider and her colleagues at the institute, the first organization to find PFAS chemicals in Cape Cod drinking water, are trying to assess the scale of the effects the contaminated water might have had on humans' health.