Study: Arsenic poisoning a risk for 50 million Pakistanis

ISLAMABAD: Some 50 million people are at risk of arsenic poisoning from contaminated groundwater in Pakistan’s Indus Valley – far more than previously thought, according to a new study.

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 findings were published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

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 such as surface slope and soil contents.

They determined that 88 million people lived in highrisk areas.

Given that about 60% to 70% of the population relies on groundwater, they calculated that roughly 50 million – maybe even 60 million – were potentially affected.

That is equal to at least a third of the 150 million already estimated by the World Health Organization to be drinking, cooking and farming with arseniclaced water worldwide.

“This is an alarmingly high number, which demonstrates the urgent need to test all drinking water wells in the Indus Plain”, with hotspots around the densely populated cities of Lahore and Hyderabad, said the study’s lead author, Joel Podgorski of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.

The highrisk 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. — AP