Arsenic poisoning in the Ganges delta

Tarit Roy Chowdhury, Gautam Kumar Basu, Badal Kumar Mandal, Bhajan Kumar Biswas, Gautam Samanta, Uttam Kumar Chowdhury, Chitta Ranjan Chanda, Dilip Lodh, Sagar Lal Roy, Khitish Chandra Saha, Sibtosh Roy, Saiful Kabir, Qazi Quamruzzaman and Dipankar Chakraborti ()
Additional contact information
Tarit Roy Chowdhury: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University
Gautam Kumar Basu: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University
Badal Kumar Mandal: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University
Bhajan Kumar Biswas: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University
Gautam Samanta: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University
Uttam Kumar Chowdhury: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University
Chitta Ranjan Chanda: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University
Dilip Lodh: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University
Sagar Lal Roy: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University
Khitish Chandra Saha: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University
Sibtosh Roy: Dhaka Community Hospital Trust
Saiful Kabir: Dhaka Community Hospital Trust
Qazi Quamruzzaman: Dhaka Community Hospital Trust
Dipankar Chakraborti: School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University

Nature, 1999, vol. 401, issue 6753, 545-546

Abstract: Abstract We have been studying the contamination of groundwater by arsenic and the attend-ant human suffering in West Bengal, India, for a decade, and in Bangladesh for the past four years. From our analysis of thousands of samples of water and sediment1,2,3,4,5,6,7, we have been able to test the course of events proposed by Nickson et al.8 to account for the poisoning of Bangladesh groundwater. We disagree with Nickson et al.'s claim that arsenic concentrations in shallow (oxic) wells are mostly below 50 μg per litre. In our samples from Bangladesh (n=9,465), 59% of the 7,800 samples taken at known depth and containing arsenic at over arsenic 50 μg per litre were collected from depths of less than 30 m, and 67% of the 167 samples with arsenic concentrations above 1,000 μg per litre were collected from wells between 11 and 15.8 m deep.

Date: 1999
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DOI: 10.1038/44056

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