Following passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, during the first ten years of the program the state health departments were given new and important roles under the law.
Due to new grants available, they had enhanced their programs and had many more resources to oversee and help utilities come into compliance with drinking water standards, and they were able to develop other related activities like the capacity for doing risk assessments on new contaminants of concern.
[1] Although the vast majority of these agencies are officially called "departments," the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials adopted "state health agency" as the generic term to reflect the fact that a substantial number of these agencies are no longer state "departments" in the traditional sense of a cabinet-level organizational unit dedicated exclusively to public health.
[2] The result is that in those jurisdictions, the state government agency that actually provides public health services is but one of several units inside a large cabinet-level agency.
[citation needed] The following are state health agencies as identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:[3] EPA Alumni Association: Drinking Water, Half Century of Progress – a brief history of U.S. efforts to protect drinking water