ARSENIC EXPOSURE X RAY SKIN

The first signs of trouble appeared in southwestern India in the 1980s, when large numbers of people started turning up with previously unseen skin lesions. By the mid-1990s, 10 million were in use in Bangladesh alone. These were simple, narrow boreholes cased with plastic pipes, generally reaching down less than 30 meters. It was a huge success infectious diseases dropped, and other organizations, along with many communities and private parties, installed many more shallow wells. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United Nations began systematically installing shallow wells in Bangladesh and other countries to provide safer water. But determining how many people are getting too much arsenic in their water is difficult, according to a 2014 study conducted in part by the Columbia Water Center.ДЄ SUCCESS, THEN TROUBLE Before wells became common in Bangladesh and other southeast Asian countries, most rural people had to drink sewage-laced surface waters. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 500 utilities in the United States provide drinking water with unsafe levels of arsenic. Some 43 million Americans depend on mostly unregulated private wells testing has shown that nearly 7 percent contain unsafe levels. Other countries with widespread problems include China, Mongolia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and the United States. Many millions more are drinking from unsafe wells in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Vietnam. A 2014 Mailman study says the figure could actually be one in five. The results: According to one 2012 Lamont study, one in 18 adult deaths can be attributed to arsenic. Some 33 million to 77 million Bangladeshis, or as much as half the current populace, have been exposed. By 1999, it was shown that half were contaminated. Nearly all water there is carried by hand, and most people live within 100 meters of a well. About 97 percent of BangladeshвЂ™s rural population depends on millions of modest community and private wells. Southeast Asia-Bangladesh in particular-is ground zero.

Altogether, it is now estimated that some 140 million people in 70 nations are exposed to unsafe levels of arsenic in well water. But starting in the 1990s, studies by scientists at Lamont and elsewhere have shown that certain natural conditions may release the arsenic into drinking-water aquifers. Inert, and thus harmless, traces of the element are locked into many rocks and sediments across the world.

They are currently leading a wide range of initiatives, including long-term health programs, continued drilling of safer wells, education, and continuing investigations into the geology of arsenic contamination.ДЄrsenic is a classic poison known since antiquity. Researchers at Columbia UniversityвЂ™s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Mailman School of Public Health have been on the front lines of the issue since 2000. The result: a slow-burning epidemic of heart disease, cancers, lung problems, and compromised child development. Some 100 million people in southeast Asia have been drinking from shallow wells originally drilled to provide germ-free water, but many turned out to be contaminated with naturally occurring arsenic.Дespite efforts to understand the natural processes at work, and provide safer water, many are still being poisoned, due to scant resources, poor information at local levels, and the sheer numbers of people and wells involved.

International health experts have called it the largest mass poisoning in history, and it is still under way.

Arsenic exposure x-ray