After many years of studying toxins in drinking water in Bangladesh, a group of volunteer researchers has come up with a cost-effective strategy to ensure that the water is safe to drink.

Drinking water in Bangladesh is notoriously contaminated with a variety of toxic contaminants, the most prevalent of which is arsenic. Consequently, most tests for contamination focus on the arsenic content. The scientists discovered that, of tubewells with safe levels of arsenic, 87% had dangerous levels of manganese and 64% had unsafe levels of uranium. 96% of the wells tested by the team had unsafe levels of these or other toxins.

Dr Bibudhendra (Amu) Sarkar of the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), who leads the team of researchers, said that over 60 million people were drinking unsafe water.

Most household water treatment systems are designed to remove arsenic but not other toxins. The team has devised a three-stage strategy for testing water quality, which is economical because it stops the testing once a sample is found to be unsafe:

step 1: all tubewells must be sampled and tested for arsenic;
step 2: if a sample meets the guidelines for arsenic, then it should be retested for manganese and uranium
step 3: if a sample meets the guidelines for all three, then it should be retested for other toxins.

The team's findings have been published online in:

Frisbie, S.H. … [et al.]. (2008). Public health strategies for western Bangladesh that address the arsenic, manganese, uranium and other toxic elements in their drinking water. Environmental health perspectives. [Online 7 October 2008]. doi:10.1289/ehp.11886

Related news:

• Bangladesh: renewed concerns about arsenic contamination, Source South Asia, 02 Oct 2008;
• Arsenic: predicting groundwater arsenic contamination from surface parameters, Source South Asia, 25 Sep 2008;
• Groundwater pollution: sanitary inspection of tubewells in Bangladesh unreliable, Source South Asia, 19 Sep 2008

Web site:Environmental Health Perspectives (for abstract and full text of the article)

Contact: Bibidhendra Sarkar, Dept. of Molecular Structure and Function, The Research Institute of The Hospital for Sick Children and Department of Biochemistry, University of Toronto, Canada, bsarkar@sickkids.ca

Source: CNW, 07 Oct 2008

Tags: south asia, technology, water quality, water treatment, water-related diseases