Ground water arsenic contamination in West Bengal, India: Health effects, genetic susceptibility and its mitigation

摘要

Arsenic in drinking water is known to cause major deleterious health impacts including cancer and even death. An intensive study was carried out to assess the arsenic-induced health effects, cytogenetic damages and genetic variants for arsenic susceptibility. Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) from arsenic metabolism, detoxification and DNA damage-repair pathway have been explored to identify the molecular bases for such susceptibility. Suboptimal DNA repair capacity was found to be a prime contender in arsenicosis individuals. Addition to this, from a longitudinal study, where same group of individuals were surveyed at two time periods (2005-06 and 2010-11), we found decrease in water arsenic content help to reduce the dermatological disorders but the non-dermatological disorders are irreversible. In our arsenic mitigation program, we have convincingly shown that rice is a significant source of arsenic exposure in human, which alone is sufficient to induce genetic damage in urothelial cells of arsenic exposed individuals.