[Sci-tech-public] Knight Seminars next week: April 5 and 7

[Eric Strattman]

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.






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NO SEMINAR:  April 14, due to AHCJ.




Eric Strattman
Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT
E19-623
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge MA  02139






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