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A mass-balance model to assess arsenic exposure from multiple wells in Bangladesh

Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology volume 32, pages 442–450 (2022)Cite this article

Abstract

Background

Water arsenic (As) sources beyond a rural household’s primary well may be a significant source for certain individuals, including schoolchildren and men working elsewhere.

Objective

To improve exposure assessment by estimating the fraction of drinking water that comes from wells other than the household’s primary well in a densely populated area.

Methods

We use well water and urinary As data collected in 2000–2001 within a 25 km2 area of Araihazar upazila, Bangladesh, for 11,197 participants in the Health Effects of Arsenic Longitudinal Study (HEALS). We estimate the fraction of water that participants drink from different wells by imposing a long-term mass-balance constraint for both As and water.

Results

The mass-balance model suggest that, on average, HEALS participants obtain 60–75% of their drinking water from their primary household wells and 25–40% from other wells, in addition to water from food and cellular respiration. Because of this newly quantified contribution from other wells, As in drinking water rather than rice was identified as the largest source of As exposure at baseline for HEALS participants with a primary household well containing ≤50 µg/L As.

Significance

Dose-response relationships for As based on water As should take into account other wells. The mass-balance approach could be applied to study other toxicants.

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Fig. 1: Simple model of urine-water arsenic relationship.
Fig. 2: Distributed wells model of urine-water arsenic relationship.
Fig. 3: Empirical relationship between urinary arsenic and primary well arsenic for all 11,197 HEALS participants.
Fig. 4
Fig. 5: Contribution of different sources of arsenic across a range of well-water arsenic concentrations.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the entire HEALS team in Araihazar and students of the Geology Department at Dhaka University for collecting the well water and urine samples.

Funding

This research was supported by the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) and by NIEHS grants P42 ES10349 and S10 OD 16384. LBH was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

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Author notes

  1. Linden B. Huhmann

    Present address: Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC), VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston, MA, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 15 Vassar St, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Linden B. Huhmann & Charles F. Harvey

  2. Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, 722 West 168th Street, New York, NY, USA

    Ana Navas-Acien, Joseph Graziano & Vesna Slavkovich

  3. NYU School of Medicine, 650 First Ave, New York, NY, USA

    Yu Chen

  4. School of Public Health, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA

    Maria Argos

  5. Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Chicago, 5841 South Maryland Avenue, Chicago, IL, USA

    Habibul Ahsan

  6. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Route 9W, Palisades, NY, USA

    Alexander van Geen

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Contributions

LBH, CFH and AvG conceived the study based on urine and well water data previously collected under a cohort study conducted by HA, JG, and AvG. VS was responsible for new rice arsenic measurements. YC, MA, and AN-A contributed to the interpretation of the results. LBH drafted the paper, which was then edited by AvG based on input from all authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexander van Geen.

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Huhmann, L.B., Harvey, C.F., Navas-Acien, A. et al. A mass-balance model to assess arsenic exposure from multiple wells in Bangladesh. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol 32, 442–450 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41370-021-00387-5

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