Unraveling Soil Processes Underlying Mass Arsenic Poisoning

CSA News 11 Arsenic (As) is a globally distributed contaminant in soils that is arguably now having one of the largest negative impacts on human health. Presently, more than 100 million people are estimated to drink groundwater having dangerous levels of arsenic, and an equal or greater number are being exposed to it through consumption of As-bearing rice. The most pressing health consequences lie in southern Asia, particularly Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, where drinking water abstracted from shallow aquifers having 10 to 100 times the recommended maximum concentration set by the World Health Organization is regularly consumed within the dominantly rural landscape. Contamination of groundwater in Asia is not, however, restricted to the Bengal Basin and instead persists across the low-lying areas of the continent such as the deltas of the Indus River in Pakistan, the Irrwaddy River of Myanmar, the Mekong River of Cambodia and Vietnam, the Red River of Vietnam, and the inland basins of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers of China.