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Arsenometer: The Groundwater-Arsenic Crisis in Bangladesh
and West Bengal, India
Dr. Pietro Perona, California Institute of Technology, EEC-9402726
| Over the past three decades, millions of water wells have been installed in villages distributed across the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta to provide pathogen-free water to the rural population. Surveys of a fraction of these wells have shown that at least one third yield water containing arsenic at concentrations that exceed the Bangladesh drinking water standard of 50 mµg/l, putting 25-50 million people at risk. In partnership with Bangladeshi scientists, an interdisciplinary team of scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, are working to resolve this crisis with the assistance of Prof. Pietro Perona, Director of the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering (CNSE), an Engineering Research Center (ERC). The CNSE has developed a low-cost, easy-to-use sampling instrument for use in testing wells for arsenic and delivered a prototype in February 2001. Tests in Bangladesh in June 2001 measured arsenic concentrations in several Bangladesh groundwater samples accurately. It is likely that new, more stringent EPA regulations on groundwater arsenic will make the device very useful in the U.S., as well. |
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