Researchers are finding arsenic in water & food supplies.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a popular book documenting arsenic’s horrific history as a poison highlighted that situation at a far-ranging symposium on arsenic here today during the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. An ACS release reports that the following topics were among the two dozen presentations at the “Arsenic Contamination in Food and Water”:
Poisoner’s cupboard: The long (and sometimes homicidal) history of arsenic in everyday life.
Arsenic in rice and rice products.
Remediation of arsenic contamination of groundwater in Asia and USA.
Development of a method for assessing perinatal exposures to heavy metals using residual dried blood spots from newborn screening programs.
Pick your poison? Arsenic in harvested country foods, edible mushrooms and wine from Canada.
Low, slow and Next Gen impact: Arsenic, human health and cancer risks.
“Because of its sinister, homicidal uses, arsenic — a naturally occurring element found in the Earth’s crust — became world-renowned as the ‘inheritance powder,’” explained Deborah Blum, the plenary speaker for the symposium. “What made arsenic such a good homicidal poison is the same thing that makes it dangerous in environmental exposures — it gives no warning,” said Blum, who is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Arsenic occurs naturally in elevated concentrations in the soil in certain areas of the world. It sometimes leaches into drinking water supplies and food. Recent reports in the news media have drawn attention to its presence in apple juice and rice, and in groundwater in Bangladesh and Chile.
“The goal of the symposium was to bring together experts on many aspects of arsenic, including general insights about arsenic contamination in food and water, regulatory issues, ways to analyze the element and ways to clean up contamination,” said Jennifer Maclachlan of PID Analyzers, LLC, who was a co-organizer of the symposium.
http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222&content_id=CNBP_032580&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=0d23e550-1f65-4acf-8c81-5e85c3c02140
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2011/world/american-arsenic-after-a-decade-small-communities-still-struggle-to-meet-federal-drinking-water-standards/
Arsenic in beer may come from widely used filtering process:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/04/08/176587506/arsenic-in-beer-may-come-from-widely-used-filtering-process?ft=1&f=1004