Open to all CU ID holders
Please join us for a special Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Morningside Lecture celebrating 75 years of cutting-edge research.
A policy breakthrough after 25 years of earth, social, and health science research on well-water arsenic in Bangladesh
Speaker: Alexander van Geen, Lamont Research Professor, Geochemistry
In response to uncertainties surrounding EPA arsenic standards for drinking water, the NIEHS Superfund Research Program enabled scientists from Mailman School of Public Health, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and local partners to establish a cohort of 12,000 men and women in rural Bangladesh exposed to varying arsenic concentrations in their well water.
The research revealed that mortality rates of participants who stopped drinking high-arsenic water for at least a decade returned to normal levels – equivalent to unexposed participants and half the rate of those who continued drinking contaminated water. This evidence of reversibility strengthens the case for exposure reduction.
Our research has also demonstrated that targeting naturally occurring low-arsenic aquifers at certain depths is more sustainable than any form of water treatment. The team has now launched two randomized controlled trials to evaluate how effectively low-arsenic aquifers can be targeted using a mobile application that accesses a government database containing 6 million georeferenced well tests.
About Dr. van Geen:
Dr. van Geen’s current research focuses on ways to reduce the impact of the environment on human health. For two decades, he has coordinated earth-science and mitigation efforts under Columbia’s Superfund Research Program on the origin and health effects of elevated levels of arsenic in groundwater. A theme that runs through this and other ongoing projects, e.g., concerning fluoride in groundwater in India, bauxite dust in Guinea, or soil contaminated with lead from mine-tailings in Peru, is that patterns of contamination are spatially very heterogeneous. This complicates prediction but often also points the way to mitigation when the hazard can be mapped. For this reason, Dr. van Geen is a firm believer in the more widespread use of field kits by non-specialists to reduce exposure to environmental toxicants, particularly in developing countries. He collaborates with public health and social scientists to evaluate how such kits can be deployed at scale and has published over 180 peer-reviewed papers on this and other environmental topics. Dr. van Geen holds a research professor appointment at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in the Columbia Climate School.
