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Arsenic poisoning in the Ganges delta

Nature volume 401, pages 545–546 (1999)Cite this article

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.

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Figure 1
Figure 2: Photomicrograph (magnification, ×100) showing the arsenic-containing opaque particles that are abundant in sediments.

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Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, 700032, India

    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 & Dipankar Chakraborti

  2. Dhaka Community Hospital Trust, Bara Moghbazar, Dhaka, 1217, Bangladesh

    Sibtosh Roy, Saiful Kabir & Qazi Quamruzzaman

Authors
  1. Tarit Roy Chowdhury
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  2. Gautam Kumar Basu
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  3. Badal Kumar Mandal
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  4. Bhajan Kumar Biswas
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  5. Gautam Samanta
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  6. Uttam Kumar Chowdhury
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  7. Chitta Ranjan Chanda
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  8. Dilip Lodh
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  9. Sagar Lal Roy
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  10. Khitish Chandra Saha
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  11. Sibtosh Roy
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  12. Saiful Kabir
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  13. Qazi Quamruzzaman
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  14. Dipankar Chakraborti
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dipankar Chakraborti.

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Chowdhury, T., Basu, G., Mandal, B. et al. Arsenic poisoning in the Ganges delta. Nature 401, 545–546 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/44056

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