Health risk associated with consumption of arsenic contaminated groundwater in the Ganga and the Brahmaputra floodplain of India

Abstract

The present study investigates the arsenic related health risk through possible consumption of groundwater in the Ganga (GFP) and the Brahmaputra (BFP) floodplains. Through our integrated chemical analysis of 507 groundwater samples, accounting all the possible dietary pathways of arsenic intake, it is revealed that GFP carries significantly higher risk in terms of cancer incidence as compared to BFP among different gender and age groups. While spatially a greater number of wells have higher arsenic in BFP but significant concentration peaks were observed in GFP where concentration reached to 106.03 μgL−1, almost 10 times higher than WHO limit. For both the floodplains, HQ remains above 1 for oral exposure ranging between 5.25 to 53.24 in the BFP and 5.6 to 57.6 in the GFP.

Keywords

• Ganga
• Brahmaputra
• Groundwater
• Arsenic
• Health risk assessment