Thakur et al. 2024 - Darrang groundwater arsenic and health risk

Thakur and colleagues investigated groundwater hydrogeochemistry and health risks from arsenic exposure in Darrang district, Assam. This is a3 groundwater-pathway evidence with a4 health-risk modelling layered onto it: the paper does not assay a bottled product, but it directly measures arsenic in a drinking-water source and quantifies child and adult risk from chronic exposure.

Key numbers

The study analyzed 347 groundwater samples in the Darrang district. The abstract states that the work evaluated concentrations and geospatial distributions of iron, fluoride, and arsenic, and that higher pH values were associated with alkaline desorption of arsenic from minerals. Reported pH values reached a maximum of 8.5 with a mean of 7.4.

The paper reiterates the World Health Organization drinking-water limit of 10 micrograms/L for arsenic and notes that several Indian states in the Ganga-Brahmaputra floodplains have elevated groundwater arsenic above that threshold.

The health-risk section reports that adults and children were evaluated separately using chronic daily intake, hazard quotient, and cancer-risk calculations. The paper states that non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic risks from prolonged arsenic exposure were significant and that children were particularly vulnerable, with higher health-risk indices than adults.

Table 1 in the extracted text shows the Darrang groundwater sample count (347) and indicates fluoride concentrations of 100-550 micrograms/L. The concluding text states that the database identified vulnerable zones for arsenic concentration and human health risk across the district.

Methods (brief)

Groundwater samples were collected across Darrang district and analyzed for arsenic, iron, fluoride, and hydrogeochemical variables. The paper used Piper and Gibbs plots, multivariate statistics, cluster analysis, and health-risk calculations following USEPA-style chronic daily intake, hazard quotient, and cancer-risk formulas. The carcinogenic potency factor used for arsenic was 1.5 mg kg^-1 day^-1, and the non-cancer reference dose for arsenic was 3 x 10^-4 mg kg^-1 day^-1.

Implications

Certification: Do not use these groundwater values as bottled-water or packaged-product occurrence data. They are source-water and risk-modelling evidence.

Courses: Useful for explaining how hydrogeochemistry, pH, and groundwater management interact with arsenic mobilization and how child-risk estimates can exceed adult-risk estimates for the same contaminated source.

App: Context only for arsenic source-water risk explanation.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• irrigation-and-soil-amendments
• source-attribution-environmental-burden-apportionment
• arsenic-total
• index

Verification notes

Recovered under the 2026-06-10 inclusion-by-default rule from a prior skip:not-target-cell disposition. The old skip ignored the fact that the paper is direct arsenic groundwater occurrence plus health-risk modelling in a vulnerable population setting.

Products and ingredients are intentionally empty because the matrix is groundwater, not a market product. Arsenic is tagged as tAs because the paper measures total groundwater arsenic and does not present inorganic-arsenic speciation for consumer-product routing.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.