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Perspectives
Annals of Arsenic
The pursuits of scientific truth and social justice are pristine ideals always worth battling for. They are in fact the basis for any outcomes-directed science policy. But the going gets rough when honest questions collide with the raw realities of economics, politics, and institutional myopia. Take arsenic.
In the U.S., environmentalists are hurling bolts at President George W. Bush for suspending the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed 10 parts per billion (ppb) standard for arsenic in drinking water. President Bill Clinton approved the standard days before he left office, but President Bush, claiming that the approval was done too hastily and unscientifically, put a hold on it and asked the National Research Council, the consulting arm of the National Academy of Sciences, to review once more the scientific state of the art of the whole problem. It did that last in 1999.
Bush may not have known it, but he wasn’t telling the truth. He was influenced by some members of Congress who wanted a less stringent standard to save money for water companies in their states. Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council also accused Bush of bowing to a mining industry unwilling to remove arsenic leached into ground water from its operations.
The standard actually took years to evolve--decades if you want to be technical. It was based on the best available science, if science is what one calls a process of understanding what takes place at the fuzzier zones of mammalian metabolism. Still, tons of “man-hours” utilizing the best brains in arsenic toxicology went into the work, which was essentially sanctioned by the NAS in its 1999 report. People around Bush chose to ignore all that, but his environmental czar, Christine Whitman, EPA administrator, knew about it in some detail, though she herself tried to cast suspicion on the quality of the science that contributed to the decision.
Water officials in New Mexico, Arizona, and other states out West, knew all that, too, but they got the time-out they wanted. Whether they get a permanent reprieve from the 10 ppb level is another question. Still, many water companies and utilities said arsenic removal from their waters is expensive, that a 10 ppb standard is dubious in its wisdom, and they don’t want to pay the costs for a number they don’t believe in.
The water officials also say that Americans can tolerate higher levels of arsenic than can the less healthy natives of poor countries, where arsenic problems are infinitely more dire, and which provide much of the epidemiological and toxicological data the arsenic experts use. But in Utah, for example, an informal survey of hale and fit rural residents ingesting well water with arsenic concentrations of at least 150 parts per billion revealed no cancer incidences over any period of time. That same level, scientists believe, would produce cancer in anyone outside Utah in five years, not to speak of skin sores and liver damage. Then there is the matter of treatment costs.
Albuquerque water people have said an arsenic standard of 13 parts per billion would cost $300 million less in treatment costs than the proposed 10 ppb level. Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman of that state agrees. He is supporting Albuquerque in seeking a lowering of the standard to 13, which doesn’t sound like much of a concession.
In any case, the whole controversy has been thrown back over to the NAS which will revisit the issue over the next four months, then report back to EPA. Overseeing the project is James J. Reisa, head of the NRC’s board on environmental studies and toxicology, who says the exercise is worth doing because more than 200 additional studies have been carried out on arsenic toxicology over the past two years. He says the NRC will recommend no standard and keep as far away from the regulatory aspects as possible. What everyone hopes for is some definitive statement that says that at 10 parts per billion or less, such and such number of people (say ten out of a thousand) are going to come down with a serious form of cancer by drinking so much water over so many years. Cancer often takes a long time to develop.
What is likely to happen is that the arguments will go on and on whatever EPA ends up proposing. The experts don’t believe EPA will change the numbers. What will most be needed, probably, are ways for municipalities and rural areas to get help in paying for treatment. EPA has plenty of information on remediation at all scales of water systems. Many are quite cheap.
So arsenic in America is a fairly hot environmental and public health topic. But for the really big story on arsenic, a visit to Bangladesh would be worth making. Bangladesh is the biggest and most tragic arsenic hot spot in the world. The arsenic problem in Bangladesh is little known to Americans because the U.S. is almost totally uninvolved with the extensive (yet insufficient) international relief efforts that are being directed toward alleviating the crisis there. It is bad in Bangladesh, very bad.
There, millions are already suffering from mild to severe cases of arsenicosis stemming from contamination of well water at levels often exceeding 500 parts per billion. The slowness of relief efforts amounts to its own type of scandal. How did the Bangladesh well water get that way? The answer is that groundwater in much of Bangladesh was always contaminated with high levels of arsenic. Only no one knew about it until the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) began overseeing the drilling of millions of wells in the 1970’s in hopes of supplying fresh, disease-free water to villages. In truth, they were opening the country to tragedy and now they are trying to play catch-up. You can visit the entire scene by accessing the core Bangladesh arsenic website at http://www.bicn.com/acic/.
So here we have one complex case of policies around water for the rich, another involving the deeper complexities of water for the poor, and the twain barely meeting at all.
The World Health Organization, whose concerns involve mainly the “Third World” countries, has already recommended an arsenic standard that it feels the whole world should shoot for: 10 parts per billion, the figure EPA settled upon. WHO has no authority to enforce anything, of course, but its influence is both scientific and moral. 10 ppb in drinking water would, it reckons, protect everyone in the world. But if New Mexico’s ranchers cannot afford to lower the arsenic level to 10 ppb in their water how can a Bangladesh village be expected to?
Bangladesh has an arsenic plan and, however idealistic, even a water plan. It needs one. Water, in one way or another—by drought, flooding, and contamination by disease-bearing microorganisms—is the cause of infinite misery in that bedeviled country. The arsenic mitigation plan was paid for mainly through a World Bank loan. Two dozen international agencies are helping out, including the United Nations Children’s Fund which inadvertently brought about the problem in the first place.
But at the pace things are moving, Bangladesh’s arsenic problem is only getting worse. Willard Chappell, a University of Colorado environmental physicist who has made a career out of studying arsenic problems world-wide, sadly reports that things are going badly in Bangladesh. An all out effort by the rich countries could solve the problem in a couple of years. But the scope of the effort would have to be vast. Meanwhile, dozens of other problems worldwide beckon. AIDS for one. Bevies of other infectious diseases for others. The intermediate hope is to supply every village pump or every family with an arsenic removal kit that costs only a handful of pennies, consists of charcoal and sand and can bring levels down to 25 parts per billion.
So that, in a quick brush, is the story of arsenic so far. The level of 10 ppb is likely, in the end, to be promulgated in the U.S., but look for many locales to seek exemptions and relief. Exceptions in the form of subsidies to cash-strapped areas may be legislated, since a special EPA revolving fund to help states pay for new systems will probably be insufficient.
Meanwhile, has Bush shown any signs of learning from his own exercise in hasty judgments? Norine Noonan for one hopes so. Noonan headed research at EPA during the Clinton Administration and was mired in the science and politics of arsenic for several months. Noonan says the logic of science can take regulation only so far. She doesn’t believe EPA regulators got a fair shake from Bush with all his talk about bad science behind Clinton’s approval.
“The standard was as much an economic decision as it was a political decision,” she says. “We did everything we could have done with arsenic. We did good work. But like the dioxin issue it isn’t easy science.
“The Administration might think the Academy is going to give them a number. They are wrong. The NRC will review the science and conclude pretty much what they concluded before. Here is the assessment, they will say, you pick the number. Frankly, we don’t understand the mechanism of arsenic toxicity. We do not have mode of action data that would suggest we depart from a linear response to dose. This was not about science. It was about money and politics.” |
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