In January, Nuevas Esperanzas started a new project to
provide families from five rural communities with filters to remove the arsenic from their drinking water. (The arsenic is naturally occurring. See my reply to Ben Sadler's comment below for an explanation.) Last year
Nuevas Esperanzas coordinated a health study which found that these families
were ingesting significant amounts of this poison in their drinking water.
People drinking water contaminated with arsenic will not usually get sick immediately. However, ingesting high levels arsenic can significantly increase the long-term risks of serious illnesses. People regularly drinking water with more that 50 ppb (parts per billion) of arsenic may be at one hundred times
greater risk of cancer later in life, for example.
With the filter project the hope is to accomplish two things. First, we want help some of the most affected
families from the study clean up their water right away. Second, we want to test to see if these
filters could be applied more widely. Unfortunately in appears that arsenic contamination could potential problem not only for these communities but also for
communities throughout the entire region.
Nuevas Esperanzas finished building the filters last month
and finished them to the families just last week. The slideshow shows the training session that
was provided before setting up the filters in each home, to explain where the arsenic
was coming from, how the filters are built, and how they clean the water.
If you’re interested in learning more about this there are articles
on the NE website about how the filters are built and how they work, as well as
about the clinics where the data was collected for the health study.
What a blessing to serve by helping a community to have clean water! Do you mention anywhere why there is arsenic in the water? I was searching around for that info and I couldn't find it. Blessings to you!
ReplyDeleteI didn't mention it, although maybe I should have. The arsenic in this case is naturally occurring. Arsenic is a mineral, and it is not unusual to find it in rocks and soils, but it typically isn't released into the ground water (mobalization). However, arsenic can be mobilized when the ground water is very hot, which is the case near the volcanoes where these communities are. So in this case the arsenic contamination is the volcano's fault.
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