Helen FieldsScience Writer

In Bangladesh, millions of people drink contaminated water that’s contaminated with arsenic. This isn’t like in a mystery novel when someone gets poisoned with arsenic. You don’t keel over dead. Water with arsenic in it is lovely and clean and doesn’t need to be boiled – and in the long term, it increases cancer risk as much as smoking.

Today I wrote for ScienceNOW about a new study on arsenic in Bangladesh. Some researchers from MIT think they’ve figured out why some water has more arsenic than other water. Special microbes dissolve the arsenic from the sediment into the water, and they need a carbon source – so the scientists who study arsenic in Southeast Asia are arguing over where that carbon comes from. The new study gives one answer to that question. Read my story here.

In the meantime, people in Bangladesh need low-arsenic water. Filters work, but they’re expensive and need maintenance. Deeper wells tap into deeper aquifers with less arsenic, but they’re also expensive, and as water is sucked out of the deep aquifer, higher-arsenic water could sink down from above.

I thought it was fascinating that the people of Bangladesh have traded deaths from water-borne disease for long-term cancer risks, but I talked to an epidemiologist, Allan Smith at Berkeley, who figures it’s not worth arguing over which was worse. “For me, it’s not something I’ve ever cared to try to quantify. Clearly we want to reduce the deaths from gastroenteritis and clearly we want to reduce the deaths from arsenic. We should just move forward.”