About 50 million people are at risk of arsenic poisoning from contaminated groundwater in Pakistan’s Indus Valley — far more than previously thought, a new study found.
Pakistan is aware of the growing problem, with arsenic levels rising in some areas as people increasingly and indiscriminately draw from the country’s underground aquifers, said Lubna Bukhari, who heads the government’s Council for Research in Water Resources.
“It’s a real concern,” she said. “Because of lack of rules and regulations, people have exploited the groundwater brutally, and it is driving up arsenic levels.”
The authors of the study developed a map highlighting areas of likely contamination based on water quality data from nearly 1,200 groundwater pumps tested from 2013 to 2015 and accounting for geological factors, including surface slope and soil contents.
They determined that about 88 million people were living in high-risk areas.
Given that about 60 percent to 70 percent of the population relies on groundwater, they calculated that about 50 million — maybe even 60 million — were potentially affected. That is equal to at least one-third of the 150 million already estimated by the WHO to be drinking, cooking and farming with arsenic-laced water worldwide.
“This is an alarmingly high number, which demonstrates the urgent need to test all drinking water wells in the Indus Plain,” with hot spots around the densely populated cities of Lahore and Hyderabad, said lead author Joel Podgorski of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.
The findings were published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
The high-risk area mapped out in the study broadly covers the middle and lower reaches of the Indus River and its tributaries, before they empty into the Arabian Sea.
Scientists had expected this area might be affected. Similar geographical areas along the Ganges River in neighboring India and Brahmaputra in Bangladesh also contain pockets of arsenic contamination.
Normally, that arsenic would stay in the ground. However, in the past few decades, South Asian countries concerned with contaminated surface water have been pumping enormous volumes of groundwater, causing the water tables to drop drastically and tapping into new water pockets tainted by the colorless, odorless toxin.
The WHO considers arsenic concentrations above 10 micrograms per liter to be dangerous. Pakistan’s guideline is five times that, and many of its wells test much higher.
Arsenic is naturally occurring and kills human cells — causing skin lesions, organ damage, heart disease and cancer. There is no cure for arsenic poisoning.
However, Abida Farooqui, assistant professor of environmental sciences at Islamabad’s Qaid-e-Azam University, said the new study’s sample size might be too small to draw clear conclusions.
“The study revealed very important and an emerging problem of arsenic in the country,” Farooqui said, but added that “only 1,193 samples have been used to predict the situation in the whole Indus Valley, which is unrealistic.”
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