Australian researchers are to leave for Bangladesh next week to trial technology with the potential to save millions of people from what has been described as the biggest mass poisoning the world has ever known.
The researchers, led by Dr Ging Khoe, a chemist in ANSTO are working through the Cooperative Research Centre for waste management and pollution control. They are to test technology designed to strip the deadly chemical arsenic from drinking water that is slowly poisoning rural Bangladeshis.
The project was today praised by Industry Science and Resources Minister Nick Minchin, on a visit to ANSTO's Lucas Heights site to open the organisation's new environmental science laboratories. It is estimated that nearly two-thirds of the area of Bangladesh is affected by arsenic-contaminated water. The source of the problem is wells sunk 10 to 15 years ago to provide an alternative to polluted surface water supplies responsible for outbreaks of diseases including cholera.
The tube wells, millions of which have been installed, had promised to deliver pure water cheaply to a country unable to afford high-technology treatment plants. But another danger existed - arsenic occurring naturally in aquifers from which the water was drawn.
The poison, which accumulates in the body and causes skin and internal cancers, has already claimed many lives. Hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis are showing the symptoms, and many face an agonising death.
The Australian research team may have the solution in patented technology originally designed to treat arsenic-laced water from mines. The technology, successfully demonstrated at a pilot plant in Montana, USA recently, uses ultraviolet light and iron salts to accelerate a reaction that turns arsenic compounds into a stable insoluble form that can easily be removed.
The team has adapted the technology for use in Bangladesh, using sunlight instead of ultraviolet lamps. The contaminated water is put into a tray big enough to hold 40 litres, the daily requirement for a household of five. Iron salt is added and the water is left in the sun for an hour before being discharged to a settling urn. By the next day, more than 90 per cent of the arsenic has coagulated and dropped to the bottom as sludge.
The simplicity of the design belies the inspiration and painstaking research that went into it.
"It's a low-cost, low-tech appropriate solution to a problem that besets Bangladesh and many other countries as well," Dr Khoe said, adding that India, Mongolia, Thailand, the USA and some South American nations also had alarmingly high levels of arsenic in their drinking water.
"Our goal is to get levels in Bangladesh down to about 40 parts per billion from concentrations ranging from 300 to 1,200 parts per billion."
With the help of funding from AusAID, the research team is to demonstrate the technology in two villages near Dhaka.
Meanwhile, Dr Khoe said the technology could also be used to immobilise arsenic waste from smelters. ANSTO is investigating similar technology for removing other contaminants.