According to the estimate made by the World Health Organization (WHO), about 60 million people in Bangladesh are exposed to dangerous levels of arsenic in drinking water. The water is more polluted than surface water, no doubt, the most used by citizens. In Bangladesh, more and most are created of deep wells to draw water, as underground waters contain much lower amounts of arsenic. The WHO considers the arsenic problem as "the largest mass poisoning in history of a people."
Unlike most countries in the region, India and Bangladesh have very deep aquifers that typically have low levels of arsenic. In Bangladesh, one of the poorest and most densely populated in the world, concern for the cultivation of rice have also contaminated by 'arsenic, has forced farmers to seek safer sources of water. Even if the water deeper is better, according to the WHO about trust that thousands of people from Pakistan to Vietnam to die of cancer each year because of exposure to arsenic in the long term. The water containing arsenic also lead to cardiovascular disease and also hamper mental development of children.
Many Bangladeshis are rightly concerned about the accumulation of arsenic in the rice fields, although the amount that actually ends up inside a grain of rice is small compared to that in 'drinking water. Every day, more than 100 million people are exposed to arsenic-contaminated drinking water in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Vietnam.
In Cambodia people, to remedy the serious problem, have begun to use filters to remove arsenic from shallow groundwater. The filtration was efficient, but usable for a short time, because you need constant maintenance and replacement of filters and reflection operation uneconomical to be used in a poor area of \u200b\u200bthe world.
arsenic But where it comes from?
Over 90 scholars have understood that the source of arsenic contamination was the Himalayas, where there are rocks and sediment laden with arsenic that come to the valley, are transported by four major river systems: the Ganges-Brahmaputra, Mekong, Irrawaddy and Red. This arsenic, a naturally occurring, is harmless until you reach the river basin. There, the bacteria on the surface and those that are released from the ground, generate a form of toxicity that acts in a slow but relentless in shallow aquifers. The process was developed for millennia, according to a discovery made by prof. Fendorf and colleagues in Cambodia in 2008.
Source: (ScienceDaily)
