Arsenic is a highly toxic element derived from both natural and human sources, the accumulation of which can trigger cancer and skin diseases in humans. A key human health concern is the contamination of drinking water and soils with arsenic, a phenomenon which is particularly prevalent in South and South-East Asia where rice is grown in contaminated water and soils. Rice plants are particularly good...
Read More
As we stood talking to a woman in the village of Madanpur in Murshidabad, her 6 or 7 year old girl used her body weight to pump water out of the handpump and drank from a bowl.
Pathalkudua perhaps needs Erin Brockovich or one of her ilk to deliver them from the canker of civic neglect. The home to 20,000 people in ward No. 17 of Ranchi is grappling with arsenic poisoning, courtesy contaminated drinking water, and their only atom of hope is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise to provide safe drinking water in the nation’s 17,995 habitations by March 2017.
Once forced to drink arsenic-contaminated ground water, residents of a remote hamlet in West Bengal near Indo-Bangla border are now purifying water from ponds and selling packaged safe drinking water to neighboring villages.
total of 65,910 Bangladeshis are affected by arsenicosis disease which is caused by drinking and using arsenic contaminated water, according to a survey conducted by the health department in 2012.
Researchers at Eawag have been involved in finding technological solutions for arsenic-contaminated drinking water over the last decades. When we also started looking at fluoride contamination in drinking water we soon came to realise how enormous the problem was and how that challenges to long-term mitigation were the same irrespective of contaminant.
Water Resource Quality (WRQ) was an integrated project running from 2006-2012 at Eawag that aimed to develop a generally applicable framework for the mitigation of geogenic contamination in groundwater used for drinking, in particular concerningarsenic and fluoride
Urgent new research is needed to better understand the full extent of arsenic contamination in food and more broadly in soil and water in South Asia, according to a new review published by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).