One of the worlds biggest environmental disasters, the arsenic poisoning of millions of people in Bangladesh and West Bengal, had its origins in the arsenic-bearing clay or peat layers at shallow depths within the Quaternary deltaic sediments of the Ganges-Brahamputra delta. As Berger (1999) pointed out, the irony was that the problem arose only recently as people started using water from tube wells drilled through international assistance programmes to provide cleaner water than available on the surface.
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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Dissanayake, C., Chandrajith, R. (2009). Medical Geology of Arsenic. In: Introduction to Medical Geology. Erlangen Earth Conference Series. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00485-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00485-8_7
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