KNIGHT SEMINAR: April 12, meet in E19-623 at 4:00pm
Throwing the Baby out with the Drinking Water: Unintended Consequences
of Arsenic Mitigation Efforts in Bangladesh
Erica Field, Associate Professor of Economics, Harvard University
The 1994 discovery of arsenic in ground water in Bangladesh prompted a
massive
public health eort to test all tubewells in the country and convince
nearly one-quarter of the population to switch to arsenic-free
drinking water sources. According to numerous sources, the campaign
was eective in leading the majority of households at risk of arsenic
poisoning to abandon backyard wells in favor of more remote tubewells
or surface water sources, a switch widely believed to have saved
numerous lives. We investigate the possibility of unintended health
consequences of the wide-scale abandonment of shallow tubewells due to
higher exposure to fecal-oral pathogens in water from arsenic-free
sources. Signicant small-scale variability of arsenic concentrations
in ground water allows us to compare trends in infant and child
mortality between otherwise similar households in the same village who
did and did not have an incentive to abandon shallow tubewells. While
child mortality rates were similar among households with arsenic-
contaminated and arsenic-free wells prior to public knowledge of the
arsenic problem, post-2000 households living on arsenic-contaminated
land have 27% higher rates of infant and child mortality than those
not encouraged to switch sources, implying that the campaign doubled
mortality from diarrheal disease. These findings provide novel
evidence of a strong association between drinking water contamination
and child mortality, a question of current scientic debate in settings
with high levels of exposure to microbial pathogens through other
channels.
**************************
NO SEMINAR: April 14, due to AHCJ.
Eric Strattman
Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT
E19-623
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge MA 02139
_______________________________________________
Sci-tech-public mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/sci-tech-public
