Going To Bangladesh?

A new twist of events has occurred and I am headed to Bangladesh in 2008/09 to complete a substantial part of my dissertation research. NIH funds the project and the team includes professors and students at Columbia University, University of North Carolina, University of Tennessee and the University of Dhaka. I am writing this entry to provide some background into why I am going and what I will be doing there.

Over the last 35 years, much work has been done by non-profit organizations installing about 10 million tube wells in rural Bangladesh to provide clean drinking water for many of the ~140 million people in one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Tragically, it was realized in the mid 1980’s that the shallow groundwater was slowly poisoning millions of people with very high levels of Arsenic (sometimes many times over the WHO drinking water guideline of 10 mg/L). Exacerbating this tragedy, although these wells were originally installed to limit people’s contact with waterborne pathogens, so prevalent in surface water, the rate of diarrheal disease remain very high resulting in much illness and high infant mortality.

This is where our team comes in. The rationale behind our approach requires some background to grasp, and if you ever want an earful, give me a call, but the short version is, there is preliminary evidence suggesting changes in shallow geology is a chief factor in determining the concentrations of pathogens in the groundwater. There is also evidence suggesting that where pathogens are present, arsenic is absent (i.e. they are negatively correlated). If this is true, then encouraging villagers to switch from high arsenic wells to low may have been pushing them from one type of disease to another. If our team can establish a general relationship between arsenic and pathogens, these findings may motivate non-profit organizations and the Bangladeshi Government to drill deeper wells. Treatment is also an option, but to date this has proved to be high maintenance and/or costly.

The idea that geology determines the microbiological quality of groundwater is not new. What is new is that the quantitative understanding of the link between geology and waterborne disease, may be readily applied to the over 50 million Americans (as well as billions of people all over the world) that rely on untreated groundwater for their drinking water.

Plans are still being made, but the rough work plan is for me to go over during the dry season (January/08) and wet season (October/08) and likely another trip in 2009.

I’m so excited!!! For non-science people this is like winning the lottery to me, getting to work within a multi-university, multi-national team filled with world leaders in their fields of study.

And because I wouldn’t be being sufficiently transparent with my readers if I didn’t say this, I’m very thankful to God for this as well. Remember me in your prayers. Culture Shock 301 here we come!