Arsenic in groundwater in the Bengal Delta Plain: slow poisoning in Bangladesh
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the problems concerning the widespread occurrences of arsenic in groundwater in Bangladesh, a land with enormous resources of precipitation, surface water, and groundwater. Because of the potential risk of microbiological contamination in the surface water, groundwater was relied on as an alternate source of drinking water. Exploitation of groundwater has increased dramatically in Bangladesh since the 1960s to provide safe water for drinking and to sustain wetland agriculture. The presence of arsenic in the groundwater at elevated concentrations has raised a serious threat to public health in the region. Nearly 6075 million people inhabiting a large geographical area are at potential risk of arsenic exposure, and several thousands have already been affected by chronic arsenicosis. The source of arsenic in groundwater is geogenic and restricted within the Holocene sedimentary aquifers. Mobilization of arsenic from the alluvial aquifers is primarily effected through a mechanism of reductive dissolution of the iron oxyhydroxides within the sediments, rather than by the oxidation of pyrite, as has been hypothesized by other workers. The problem is further accentuated by the fact that arsenic is also found at elevated concentrations in vegetables and rice grown in the areas where high-arsenic groundwater is used for irrigation. Dietary habits among the population are also an important pathway for arsenic ingestion. Studies are in progress at national as well as international levels to alleviate the arsenic crisis in Bangladesh. Besides the identification of arsenic-free tubewells in the affected areas for drinking purposes, purification of groundwater at household level by low-cost arsenic removal techniques is suggested. Rehabilitation of the patients with chronic arsenicosis and arsenic education programs for rural communities must be addressed urgently by the government of Bangladesh. Key words: arsenic, groundwater, chemistry, redox, causes, effects, Bangladesh.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".