Re: Arsenic Poisoning In Bangladesh Pdf Free
Josephine Heathershaw
Widespread use of arsenic-contaminated water in Bangladesh during the 20th century has been called by the World Health Organization the largest mass poisoning in history. A new study co-authored by Yale economist Mark Rosenzweig finds that, in addition to profound health impacts, high levels of arsenic retention has caused a significant decline in the productivity, cognition, and earnings of Bangladeshis.
Until now, much of the literature on this public health crisis has revolved around the health effects of arsenic retention, and previous related economic research primarily focused on the associations between arsenic poisoning and economic outcomes rather than identifying the causal effects.
Using molecular genetics analysis, Rosenzweig and his co-authors, Mark Pitt of Brown University and M. Nazmul Hassan of the University of Dhaka, however, were able to pinpoint the direct effects of the poisoning on economic outcomes such as productivity. Their article is forthcoming in the Review of Economic Studies and has been published online.
With data that followed individuals from 1982 to 2008, the researchers were able to identify the extent to which retained arsenic has affected economic outcomes for the people of Bangladesh. For instance, they found that reducing arsenic retention by one standard deviation would improve performance on a nonverbal intelligence test by 24%. Similarly, this arsenic poisoning also caused lower schooling attainment, especially among younger Bangladeshi men who would have been exposed to the arsenic at early ages in contrast to older cohorts.
Bangladeshis also saw the impact that arsenic poisoning had on their job prospects. If the amount of retained arsenic in their bodies was halved, the researchers found, the number of young men who took on high-skilled labor, including in medicine or business management, would grow by 24%. Similarly, it would boost the number of young male entrepreneurs by 26%.
Despite this, the researchers identify positive economic benefits for women, too, including a boost in productivity, if the level of arsenic in their water sources were reduced. Women, however, are also responsible for home-production, which includes collecting water for their households. The provision of non-contaminated water in the home would therefore reduce their time spent traveling greater distances to source clean water.
I have been studying heavy metallic contamination of water in India and my findings are almost similar to what has been mentioned by the author. There is a solution but it is not implemented because of lack of political well.
Top: The telltale marks of arsenic poisoning appear on the hands of a 54-year-old woman in Narayangonj, Bangladesh. Long-term exposures are linked to cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other illnesses. Visual: Zakir Hossain Chowdhury/Barcroft Media via Getty
It is the well water that has brought Dr. Islam to the village today. He is working with the University of Chicago and Columbia University to study the effects of long-term exposure to the famously risky element, arsenic. About half of the wells in their study area of 35,000 people in the region of Araihazar contain arsenic at more than 50 parts per billion, five times the World Health Organization standard of 10.
To appreciate why that question is such a complicated one, one has to go back to the moment in time several decades ago when public agencies decided to first tackle water quality problems in Bangladesh.
In the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people a year in Bangladesh were dying from cholera and other diarrheal diseases. UNICEF and other international organizations were on a mission to help countries access clean water throughout the developing world. In an effort to get people to stop drinking dirty surface water, they worked with the Bangladeshi government to promote the use of shallow, hand-pumped wells.
It seemed to be a textbook solution: cheap; easy to maintain; a collaboration of government, community, and private sector; and focused on attacking the root cause instead of the symptoms. An estimated 10 million hand-pumped tube wells were drilled across the country, at first by the government, UNICEF, and other donors and NGOs, and later by individuals and families. The project appeared to be a roaring success. The purity of the water was even tested by the British Geological Survey. Unfortunately, they did not test for arsenic.
At issue is a question that goes beyond the case of Bangladesh to a larger dilemma facing the powerful institutions that get involved around the world: Who is responsible when an effort to do good ends up doing harm? The charity or foreign aid agency? The government that received the aid? The consulting firms that worked on the project? With no accountability in sight, the people who were supposed to be the ones being helped are left to pick up the pieces.
In the wake of the massive testing program after the arsenic was discovered, interest from government and donors faded in the last decade. Dr. Kazi Matin Ahmed, Chairman of the Department of Geology at the University of Dhaka who has been working with the Columbia University team, says that the Bangladeshi government possesses most of the resources to address the problem.
In the district of Faridpur, a rural area near Dhaka on the banks of the Padma River, Abdul Latif Sheikh lives in what seems like an idyllic village compound, with a brown calf in the yard and the sound of roosters crowing as they bobble around the water pump. Sheikh is strapping and tall, but his voice rings with disappointment.
He and his wife Rokeya drank for years from arsenic contaminated well. Rokeya has dark marks on her hands, wrists, and feet. She picks at them as he talks. She is sick and losing weight. She has no time to go to the doctor; since her husband cannot work, she must bring in the money. Their son and daughter live with them.
The Bangladeshi government has installed more than 200,000 new tube wells in the last decade, but they are part of general infrastructure development and not intended to address the public health problems related to arsenic contamination. A report by Human Rights Watch found that the wells often appeared to be going to politically connected villagers, echoing a similar finding by Alexander Van Geen of Columbia.
In fact, skin lesions are a poor proxy for arsenic poisoning because they only occur in a small minority of cases, says Graziano. Graziano is a co-author of the HEALS study, which closely tracked the dose-response effect in a population over time, making it the most definitive study of arsenic poisoning so far. In most cases, the effects of arsenic poisoning may remain hidden for years until the damage is already done, he says.
In the village of Batachow in Comilla, Southeast of Dhaka, the agency worked with the village to install a piped water facility using a central filtration plant, consisting of brewery-sized gleaming tanks and trellised water filters. As a result, Batachow, which was once almost completely contaminated, now has safe water.
But as much as people in the village embrace their new water system, raising enough funding for maintenance remains a struggle for the community. And neither the government nor the public health organizations have plans to invest further at this point.
Sam Loewenberg is a journalist who covers the intersection of global health, business, government and politics. His articles and photography have appeared in The Economist, The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Portfolio, The Atlantic Online, Fortune, The Nation, The Washington Post, Slate, Salon, and The Lancet.
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In Bangladesh and West Bengal, alluvial Ganges aquifers used for public water supply are polluted with naturally occurring arsenic, which adversely affects the health of millions of people. Here we show that the arsenic derives from the reductive dissolution of arsenic-rich iron oxyhydroxides, which in turn are derived from weathering of base-metal sulphides. This finding means it should now be possible, by sedimentological study of the Ganges alluvial sediments, to guide the placement of new water wells so they will be free of arsenic.
a, Arsenic correlates with dissolved iron and with bicarbonate concentrations above 300 mg per litre; the latter is a by-product of iron oxyhydroxide reduction. b, Relation of arsenic and iron in aquifer sediments; arsenic concentrations are up to 15 times higher than crustal abundance.
The arsenic-rich groundwater is mostly restricted to the alluvial aquifers of the Ganges delta3,6. The source of arsenic-rich iron oxyhydroxides must therefore lie in the Ganges source region upstream of Bangladesh. Weathered base-metal deposits are known to occur6,8,9,10 in the Ganges basin (at Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal), so weathering of these arsenic-rich base-metal sulphides must have supplied arsenic-rich iron oxyhydroxide to downstream Ganges sediments during Late Pleistocene-Recent times. The arsenic-rich iron oxyhydroxides are now being reduced, causing the present problem. Reduction is driven by concentrations of sedimentary organic matter3 of up to 6%.
A knowledge of the sedimentary architecture and distribution of iron, arsenic and reductant carbon in Ganges alluvial sediments will allow the development of a predictive model to guide future aquifer development in a way that minimizes arsenic pollution. Furthermore, as dissolved iron is oxidized it precipitates as iron oxyhydroxide, which scavenges arsenic from solution. It follows that simple aeration of anoxic Bangladesh groundwater, followed by settling, should remove a considerable amount of arsenic from solution. This simple treatment could be performed on a household or village scale. Although the disposal of the arsenic-rich iron oxyhydroxides would require special arrangement, this would be preferable to either the widespread poisoning that now exists or a return to the use of contaminated surface water for public consumption.
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