Potential for arsenic contamination of rice in Bangladesh: spatial analysis and mapping of high risk areas

Abstract

Knowledge of the location and severity of arsenic contamination in Bangladesh is required to develop land and resource management strategies to reduce both human exposure to arsenic and arsenic contamination of food and water supplies. While the threat posed by directly drinking arsenic contaminated water has been well documented, the potential for exposure through secondary sources is not as well-understood. Given that rice accounts for 70% of an average adult's caloric intake in Bangladesh, the potential for exposure to arsenic through rice consumption must be considered in environmental health investigations.

Spatial Variation of Arsenic in Soil, Irrigation Water, and Plant Parts: A Microlevel Study

“…Of the three rice seasons, Boro (dry season rice) is fully grown under irrigated condition and 79.1% of the Boro area is irrigated by ground water [10] and, thus, growing rice in the Boro season has become the major concern in terms of arsenic poisoning in human body. Ross et al [11] reported that mean ground water arsenic concentrations are below 50  μ g/L in 76% of irrigated Boro rice areas and in 7% of areas, mean concentrations of As are greater than 100  μ g/L primarily in south central and western central Bangladesh. Arsenic in rice grains is especially dangerous for the Bangladeshi people because of the relatively high consumption of about 450 g per person per day.…”

Phytoremediation: a property of plant to clean up our environment

“…So far, more than 400 plant species have been reported as major soil contaminant, metal hyperaccumulators, representing less than 0.2% of all angiosperms (Ross et al, 2006;Yang et al, 2013). Promising studies at molecular level shows that the major soil contaminant in our dying industrial area of our country, Zinc (Zn) uptake is regulated by ZIP family genes in Arabidopsis thaliana (Shahandeh and Hossner, 2000;Haque et al, 2016).…”

“…There is a growing trend in areas of land, surface waters and groundwater around the world affected by contamination from industrial and agricultural activities either due to ignorance, lack of vision, or carelessness (Hauqe et al, 2016;Ross et al, 2006;Yang et al, 2013). For example, concentrations of Cu, Zn, Pb, Cr, Cd, Fe, and Ni estimated in soils and vegetables grown in and around an industrial area of a developing country, Bangladesh showed the following order of metal contents in contaminated irrigation water: Fe >Cu>Zn>Cr>Pb>Ni>Cd.…”

“…The results revealed that the water present in the surface of this area is highly contaminated (Ahmed et al, 2012). The most dangerous news is that a study provides a spatial assessment of the risk of arsenic contamination of the principal food of Bangladesh, rice, because of the use of arsenic polluted groundwater for irrigation (Ross et al, 2006). So it has become very important for us to find a way to remove these contaminants from our environment.…”

“…In plants, cleavage of the target mRNA appears to be the prevalent method of post-transcriptional regulation (Brodersen et al, 2008). Although miRNAs have been intensively studied over the last few years, little research is performed on the role of miRNAs in various organic material stress responses like heavy metal (Ross et al, 2006). Nevertheless, a number of studies verified the involvement of miRNAs in responses to different metal toxicities (Sunkar et al, 2006), mostly using screenings like microarrays (Ding et al, 2011) and deep sequencing of small RNA libraries (Zhou et al, 2012a).…”