Every day, more than 140 million people in southern Asia drink groundwater contaminated with arsenic. Thousands of people in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar and Vietnam die of cancer each year from chronic exposure to arsenic, according to the World Health Organization. Some health experts call it the biggest mass poisoning in history.
According to a 1999 study by the National Academy of Sciences, arsenic in drinking water causes bladder, lung and skin cancer, and may cause kidney and liver cancer. The study also found that arsenic harms the central and peripheral nervous systems, as well as heart and blood vessels, and causes serious skin problems. It also may cause birth defects and reproductive problems.
"How does the arsenic go from being in the sediment loads, in solids, into the drinking water?" said Fendorf, a professor of environmental Earth system science and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment.
To find out, he launched a field study in Asia in 2004 with two Stanford colleagues: Chris Francis, an assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences, and Karen Seto, now at Yale University. The initial study was funded with a two-year Woods Institute Environmental Venture Projects grant. Five years later, the research team appears to have solved the arsenic mystery and is working with policymakers and government officials to prevent the health crisis from escalating.
"We found out that, sure enough, within the first 2 to 3 feet from the surface, arsenic was coming out of the solids-that is, the sediments transported down from the Himalayas—and into the water, and then it migrated down into the aquifer," Fendorf said. Aquifers are the source of drinking water for people who use wells throughout Cambodia, Bangladesh, Myanmar, India and Vietnam.
Beginning March 24, Fendorf will co-host a four-day meeting on arsenic poisoning in Siam Reap, Cambodia, with about 60 experts, including government officials, scholars, NGOs and funding agencies, such as the World Bank. The meeting was convened by the American Geophysical Union and the Woods Institute.
Arsenic is in water in 25 states of the United States. Due to the ability for better water filtration in this area of the world it doesn't provide as much of a threat, but it is still cause for concern.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency often finds problems with bottled water, but doesn't tell the public about them.
Canada's federal food watchdog issued 29 recall notices for bottled water products between 2000 and early 2008, citing deficiencies such as contamination by bacteria, moulds, glass chips and trace amounts of arsenic.
Of the recalls, affecting 49 different products, it issued a public warning in only seven cases, two of which came after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made public its recall orders.
Source for some of this article came from: Stanford University (2009, March 25). New Solutions For The Arsenic-poisoning Crisis In Asia. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
