Does Arsenic Mitigation in Bangladesh Raise Exposure to E. coli and Rotavirus? Subcontract from Columbia University.

Diarrheal disease is the cause of an estimated 4-6 million deaths in the developing world each year. Many different pathogens cause diarrheal disease and most are spread through fecal-oral transmission. Fecal-oral transmission is caused by poor water quality, sanitation, and hygiene. The spatial and temporal patterns of diarrheal disease caused by different pathogens can be quite different, however, suggesting that there may be different modes of transmission as well. The premise of this project is that the microbial contamination of shallow groundwater in a densely populated rural setting such as Bangladesh is a significant, but overlooked, factor that affects the distribution of certain forms of diarrheal disease. This premise will be systematically addressed with field data by comparing the behavior of two organisms, Shigella and rotavirus, both of which are leading causes of diarrheal disease in rural Bangladesh, as well as the fecal indicators E. coli and Bateroides, across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Our central hypothesis is that the incidence of certain forms of water-related diarrhea in Bangladesh is negatively correlated to the arsenic content of groundwater for households relying on a shallow tubewell as their main source of drinking water. The proposed mechanism underlying this negative correlation is that differences in local hydrogeology result in greater vulnerability to pathogen contamination for those shallow aquifiers where accumulation of dissolved arsenic is less likely. Such a linkage will be tested starting from health records and stool samples collected over the past 15 years in Matlab, Bangladesh, and hydrogeological data collected over the past 7 years in Araihazar, Bangladesh. These two unique data sets will be related to each other through field experiments and monitoring of microbial pathogens over spatial scales ranging from 1-1000 m.

Principal Investigators: Michael Emch, Serre, Marc

Other Investigators: Band, Lawrence

Funding Source: National Science Foundation

Grant Number: Columbia Subcontract

Funding Period: 08/01/07-07/31/10