“This is the highest known increase in mortality from any environmental exposure,” says Allan Smith from the University of California at Berkeley.
Have a read through these two articles, one by the BBC and the other by Telegraph both out of the UK, explaining the dangerous levels of Arsenic in the drinking water and groundwater (that rice grows in). Apparently affecting 140 million people worldwide, this arsenic risk will increase the rates of cancer in the future.
I understand the exposure to arsenic has grown slowly as less-developed countries have urged citizens to dig wells rather than drink surface water. The deeper water is exposed to the arsenic naturally present in the soil, which is still probably better than the polluted surface water.
What I do not understand is the massive increase. I’m surprised to learn that this is all caused by an expansion of digging wells. Were there really that few people worldwide not using wells for drinking water? And even then, how has the soil that we have been growing rice in changed from the past? I think these articles are trying to infer that there is some other cause for this increase in this risk, but they do not say what. It seems strange to me there is such a change in risk for what seems to be a fairly standardized practice over many centuries (drinking water and growing/eating rice).
