Mason Inman - science journalist

2009-01-02, 14:50

You might think it should go unsaid that bottled water (especially premium drinking water) would be "free from arsenic," since it's a toxic element that's responsible for what's been called "the world's worst mass poisoning." But in Bangladesh, this is a point worth advertising.

Acme bottled water now "free from arsenic" (click above for larger photo)

(Arsenic is used to make pesticides, herbicides and insecticides, and drinking water laced with it can cause skin disease, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, numbness in the hands and feet and partial paralysis, and blindness, not to mention various kinds of cancer (bladder, lung, kidney, prostate, and more), the EPA says.)

In one of the most notorious cases of unwanted consequences, Bangladeshis have suffered these problems from unknowingly drinking arsenic-laden water, drawn up from deep tube wells that aid agencies put in. These deep wells allowed people to avoid drinking water from rivers and ponds, or from shallow wells, which can be contaminated with bacteria causing cholera and other diarrheal disease.

Now many wells have been tested and marked if they have high levels of arsenic, and researchers are trying to understand where arsenic occurs in the ground, so that they can figure out where to drill tube wells while avoiding the poison. Meanwhile, others are working on low-cost ways of pulling arsenic out of the water—the most promising, perhaps, is a sand filter filled with bits of iron, which react with the arsenic and pull it out of the water. This invention won Bangaldeshi researcher Abul Hussum a million-dollar prize, and MIT researchers are trying to scale up his filter to meet the great need.

I have no idea whether this Acme bottled water is actually free from arsenic. Who's checking their claims? But I hope that someone is able to get arsenic-free water to Bangladeshis at a price way below that of bottled water.