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Brief Communications

Nature 401, 545-546 (7 October 1999) | doi:10.1038/44056

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Arsenic poisoning in the Ganges delta

Tarit Roy Chowdhury1, Gautam Kumar Basu1, Badal Kumar Mandal1, Bhajan Kumar Biswas1, Gautam Samanta1, Uttam Kumar Chowdhury1, Chitta Ranjan Chanda1, Dilip Lodh1, Sagar Lal Roy1, Khitish Chandra Saha1, Sibtosh Roy2, Saiful Kabir2, Qazi Quamruzzaman2 & Dipankar Chakraborti1

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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 mug 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 mug per litre were collected from depths of less than 30 m, and 67% of the 167 samples with arsenic concentrations above 1,000 mug per litre were collected from wells between 11 and 15.8 m deep.