Solving history’s ‘largest mass poisoning’
Researchers in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering believe they have pinpointed a pathway by which arsenic may be contaminating the drinking water in Bangladesh, a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists, world health agencies and the Bangladeshi government for nearly 30 years. The research suggests that human alteration to the landscape, the construction of villages with ponds, and the adoption of irrigated agriculture are responsible for the current pattern of arsenic concentration underground. The findings also indicate that drinking-water wells drilled to a greater depth would likely provide clean water.Bangladesh is the seventh most populous country in the world, and tens of millions of its citizens have been exposed to arsenic in their water over the past several decades. As many as 3,000 Bangladeshis die from arsenic-induced cancer each year and today approximately 2 million people in the country live with arsenic poisoning, which manifests as skin lesions and...