ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is aware of the growing problem of arsenic levels rising in some areas as people increasingly and indiscriminately draw from the underground aquifers, said Lubna Bukhari, who heads the Council for Research in Water Resources.

“It’s a real concern,” she said. “Because of lack of rules and regulations, people have exploited the groundwater brutally, and it is driving up arsenic levels.”

Ms Bukhari’s remarks came on Thursday, a day after a study disclosed that some 50 million people were at risk of arsenic poisoning from contaminated groundwater in the Indus Valley — far more than previously thought.

The authors of the study, published in the journal Science Advances on Wednes­day, developed a map highlighting areas of likely contamination based on water quality data from nearly 1,200 groundwater pumps tested from 2013 to 2015. They determined some 88m people were living in high-risk areas.

“This is an alarmingly high number, which demonstrates the urgent need to test all drinking water wells in the Indus Plain,” with hotspots around Lahore and Hyderabad, said the study’s lead author Joel Podgorski of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.

The WHO considers arsenic concentrations above 10 micrograms per litre to be dangerous. Pakistan’s guideline is five times that, and many of its wells test much higher.

Arsenic is naturally occurring and kills human cells causing skin lesions, organ damage, heart disease and cancer. There is no cure for arsenic poisoning.

One of those researchers, Abida Farooqui, assistant professor of environmental sciences at Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University, said the study’s sample size may be too small to draw clear conclusions.

“The study revealed very important and an emerging problem of arsenic in the country,” Ms Farooqui said. But “only 1,193 samples have been used to predict the situation in the whole Indus Valley, which is unrealistic”.

In any case, no map can tell villagers whether a specific well is contaminated. Arsenic concentration varies widely from pump to pump, and the only way to know for certain is to test each one.

Ms Bukhari described the problem as urgent. She said her department was working with the UN Children’s Fund to provide cheap anti-arsenic water filters to villagers in the worst-affected areas.

“We should immediately discourage the indiscriminate ground water exploitation,” she said, noting that even city-dwellers with municipal water access were digging tubewells “to have a lavish supply of water”. But the country also needs to atest countless tubewells and identify which have tapped into arsenic, possibly determining which depths might be safer, she said.

Published in Dawn, August 25th, 2017