P. J. Atkins

The Spatial Pattern of Risk from Arsenic Poisoning: A Bangladesh Case Study

Abstract Arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh has been one of the biggest environmental health and social disasters of recent times. About seventy million people in Bangladesh are exposed to toxic levels of arsenic (0.05 mg/L) in drinking water. It is ironic that so many tubewells have been installed in recent times to provide drinking water that is safe from water-borne diseases but that the water pumped is contaminated with toxic levels of arsenic. Along with the clinical manifestations, some social problems have also emerged due to arsenic toxicity. Analysing the spatial risk pattern of arsenic in groundwater is the main objective of this paper. Establishing the extent of arsenic exposure to the people will facilitate an understanding of the health effects and estimating the population risk over the area. This paper seeks to explore the spatial pattern of arsenic concentrations in groundwater for analyzing and mapping ‘problem regions’ or ‘risk zones’ for composite arsenic hazard information by using GIS-based data processing and spatial analysis along with state-of-the-art decision-making techniques. Quantitative data along with spatial information were employed and analyzed for this paper.

Sophistication detected : or, the adulteration of the milk supply, 1850-1914.

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Teaching Geographical Information Handling Skills for Lower‐income Countries

Geographical Information Systems are seen by many as a quick ‘fix’ for the problems of lower-income countries and people in those countries have been encouraged to adopt this perception, along with the technology. As teachers of students from LICs, we seek to avoid reproducing a contextless transfer of technical skills and rather aim to promote an education based on the limitations of the technology and on the nature and construction of information. While identifying GIS as one of many components of ‘geographical information’, we emphasise the importance of including ‘non-GIS’ staff in the education process. We advocate a ‘problem-posing’ approach to the teaching of ‘Geographical Information for Development’ and discuss some of the challenges which this raises, both for teachers and students.

The Milk in Schools Scheme, 1934-45: "Nationalization" and Resistance.

In October 1934 the National Government took over what had previously been a commercial initiative to encourage milk‐drinking in schools. By the outbreak of war the Milk in Schools Scheme had reached 87 per cent of elementary schools in England and Wales and 56 per cent of pupils were drinking one‐third of a pint daily. This paper investigates the motivations behind this scheme and the problems associated with its implementation. There was resistance from within government and a number of objections were raised around the country, particularly to the strategy of the Board of Education. The conclusions are, first, that the economic necessity of providing a market for liquid milk was more important in the mind of policy‐makers than nutritional supplements for undernourished children and, second, that the evolution of the policy itself was highly contingent upon the network of power and influence within which it operated. In 1933 it would have been difficult to predict with any degree of certainty how a Milk in Schools Scheme would have operated, but in time it was to become one of the government’s most robust and universally supported food policies.

Arsenic risk mapping in Bangladesh: a simulation technique of cokriging estimation from regional count data.

Risk analysis with spatial interpolation methods from a regional database on to a continuous surface is of contemporary interest. Groundwater arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh and its impact on human health has been one of the “biggest environmental health disasters” in current years. It is ironic that so many tubewells have been installed in recent times for pathogen-free drinking water but the water pumped is often contaminated with toxic levels of arsenic. This paper seeks to analyse the spatial pattern of arsenic risk by mapping composite “problem regions” in southwest Bangladesh. It also examines the cokriging interpolation method in analysing the suitability of isopleth maps for different risk areas. GIS-based data processing and spatial analysis were used for this research, along with state-of-the-art decision-making techniques. Apart from the GIS-based buffering and overlay mapping operations, a cokriging interpolation method was adopted because of its exact interpolation capacity. The paper presents an interpolation of regional estimates of arsenic data for spatial risk mapping that overcomes the areal bias problem for administrative boundaries. Moreover, the functionality of the cokriging method demonstrates the suitability of isopleth maps that are easy to read.

Application of geostatistics with Indicator Kriging for analyzing spatial variability of groundwater arsenic concentrations in Southwest Bangladesh

This article seeks to explore the spatial variability of groundwater arsenic (As) concentrations in Southwestern Bangladesh. Facts about spatial pattern of As are important to understand the complex processes of As concentrations and its spatial predictions in the unsampled areas of the study site. The relevant As data for this study were collected from Southwest Bangladesh and were analyzed with Flow Injection Hydride Generation Atomic Absorption Spectrometry (FI-HG-AAS). A geostatistical analysis with Indicator Kriging (IK) was employed to investigate the regionalized variation of As concentration. The IK prediction map shows a highly uneven spatial pattern of arsenic concentrations. The safe zones are mainly concentrated in the north, central and south part of the study area in a scattered manner, while the contamination zones are found to be concentrated in the west and northeast parts of the study area. The southwest part of the study area is contaminated with a highly irregular pattern. A Generalized Linear Model (GLM) was also used to investigate the relationship between As concentrations and aquifer depths. A negligible negative correlation between aquifer depth and arsenic concentrations was found in the study area. The fitted value with 95 % confidence interval shows a decreasing tendency of arsenic concentrations with the increase of aquifer depth. The adjusted mean smoothed lowess curve with a bandwidth of 0.8 shows an increasing trend of arsenic concentration up to a depth of 75 m, with some erratic fluctuations and regional variations at the depth between 30 m and 60 m. The borehole lithology was considered to analyze and map the pattern of As variability with aquifer depths. The study has performed an investigation of spatial pattern and variation of As concentrations.

Indigenous floating cultivation: a sustainable agricultural practice in the wetlands of Bangladesh

Floating-bed cultivation has proved a successful means to produce agricultural crops in various wetland areas of the world. In freshwater lakes and wetlands, vegetables, flowers, and seedlings are grown in Bangladesh using this floating cultivation technique, without any additional irrigation or chemical fertiliser. No detailed study of this indigenous cultivation technique has been published to date, although the laboratory method, hydroponics, is well documented in the professional literature. Our study is focused on the nature and characteristics of the Bangladeshi system, where local farmers have demonstrated the potential for the sustainable use of such common-property local water resources. We seek to establish a reference point for further research into this technique for its possible refinement and an assessment of its suitability for replication.

Environmental Irony: Summoning Death in Bangladesh

The arsenic crisis that affects at least thirty million water consumers in Bangladesh has been called the worlds greatest ever environmental health disaster. Although the problem and the potential solutions have been presented confidently in the media, the argument of this paper is that, ironically, very little of the science or the technology is certain. From the spatial and depth variabilities of contamination, through safety thresholds, to the accuracy of field testing kits, we find indeterminacy. We argue that rather than shying away from such uncertainty, however, mitigation policies must acknowledge and embrace it if any real progress is to be made.

Bovine tuberculosis and badgers in Britain: relevance of the past.

The European badger (Meles meles) has been identified as a wildlife reservoir of bovine tuberculosis and a source of transmission to cattle in Britain and Ireland. Both behavioural ecology and statistical ecological modelling have indicated the long-term persistence of the disease in some badger communities, and this is postulated to account for the high incidence of bovine tuberculosis in cattle across large tracts of England and Wales. This paper questions this consensus by using historical cartographic evidence to show that tuberculosis in cattle had a very different spatial distribution before 1960 to the present day. Since few of the badgers collected in road traffic accidents between 1972 and 1990 had tuberculosis in counties such as Cheshire, where the disease had until shortly before that been rife in the cattle population, the role of badgers as reservoirs in spreading disease in similar counties outside the south-west of England has to be questioned.

Fear of animal foods: A century of zoonotics

Animal diseases can be spread to humans through the food supply. The article investigates this zoonotic hazard in an historical context and reflects on the nature of public reactions to such risk. It concludes that food scares have been with us for at least 150 years and that consumer responses in terms of changes in demand have been complex.