West Bengal, Bangladesh sitting on arsenic time bomb

People in West Bengal, India, and Bangladesh are at an increased risk of contracting cancer due to overexposure to arsenic contaminated water.

London, Aug 31 : People in West Bengal, India, and Bangladesh are at an increased risk of contracting cancer due to overexposure to arsenic contaminated water.

Deep tube-well water and dietary habits, which involve eating large amounts rice grown in the affected areas, contribute to the problem, the scientists said at the annual Royal Geographic Society meeting in London.

The first signs of arsenic-contaminated water posing a major health issue emerged in the 1980s, with the documentation of poisoned communities in Bangladesh and West Bengal.

In order to avoid drinking surface water, which can be contaminated with bacteria causing diarrhoea and other diseases, the government promoted the digging of wells, not suspecting that well water would emerge with elevated levels of arsenic.

The metal is present naturally in soil, and leaches into groundwater, with bacteria thought to play a role. Depletion of the subterranean water level increases the arsenic concentration.

Peter Ravenscroft, a research associate in geography with Cambridge University, said, since the 1980s, large-scale contamination has been found in other Asian countries such as China, Cambodia and Vietnam, in South America and Africa.

About 140 million people, mainly in developing countries, are being poisoned by arsenic in their drinking water, he said, adding that South and East Asia accounted for more than half of the known cases globally.

"It's a global problem, present in 70 countries, probably more. If you work on drinking water standards used in Europe and North America, then you see that about 140 million people around the world are above those levels and at risk," the BBC quoted him as saying.

"In the long term, one in every 10 people with high concentrations of arsenic in their water will die from it. This is the highest known increase in mortality from any environmental exposure," added Allan Smith from the University of California at Berkeley.

Arsenic consumption leads to higher rates of some cancers, including tumours of the lung, bladder and skin, and other lung conditions. Some of these effects show up decades after the first exposure.

ANI