'Bangladeshis exposed to arsenic'

Source: Press TV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=131183&sectionid=351020406

Up to 77 million people in Bangladesh have been exposed to toxic levels of arsenic in drinking water, putting them at risk of an early death, a recent study shows.

The new study published Saturday in the British medical journal, the Lancet, found that more than 20 percent of deaths among those assessed could be attributed to the naturally occurring poisonous element.

Nearly 12,000 Bangladeshis in a district of the capital Dhaka were assessed during the 10-year study.

"Tens of millions of people there are at high risk of dying early. Something needs to be done urgently to reduce the exposure to arsenic for this population and find alternative, safe drinking water sources," said Dr. Habibul Ahsan of the University of Chicago Medical Center, whose study appears in the Lancet.

Ahsan and his colleagues studied Bangladesh as 90 percent of that nation's population has used groundwater as the primary source of fresh water since hand-pumped wells were installed in the 1970s to tap groundwater. As a result, as many as 77 million people, or half the population of Bangladesh, have been exposed to toxic levels of the poisonous element.

"There are other countries in the world where arsenic in drinking water is also a public health problem. It may not be on the same scale as in Bangladesh," Ahsan said.

The World Health Organization said the exposure was "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history".