Abstract
High levels of arsenic in drinking water and food materials continue to pose a global health challenge. Over 127 million people alone in Bangladesh (BD) and West Bengal (WB) state of India are exposed to elevated levels of arsenic in drinking water. Despite decades of research and outreach, arsenic awareness in communities continue to be low. Specifically, very few studies reported arsenic awareness among low-income farming communities. A comprehensive approach to assess arsenic awareness is a key step in identifying research and development priorities so that appropriate stakeholder engagement may be designed to tackle arsenic menace. In this study, we developed a comprehensive arsenic awareness index (CAAI) and identified key awareness drivers (KADs) of arsenic to help evaluate farmers’ preferences in dealing with arsenic in the environment. The CAAI and KADs were developed using a questionnaire survey in conjunction with ten machine learning (ML) models coupled with a hybrid feature selection approach. Two questionnaire surveys comprising of 73 questions covering health, water and community, and food were conducted in arsenic-affected areas of WB and BD. Comparison of CAAIs showed that the BD farmers were generally more arsenic-aware (CAAI = 7.7) than WB farmers (CAAI = 6.8). Interestingly, the reverse was true for the awareness linked to arsenic in the food chain. Application of hybrid feature selection identified 15 KADs, which included factors related to stakeholder interventions and cropping practices instead of commonly perceived factors such as age, gender and income. Among ML algorithms, classification and regression trees and single C5.0 tree could estimate CAAIs with an average accuracy of 84%. Both communities agreed on policy changes on water testing and clean water supply. The CAAI and KADs combination revealed a contrasting arsenic awareness between the two farming communities, albeit their cultural similarities. Specifically, our study shows the need for increasing awareness of risks through the food chain in BD, whereas awareness campaigns should be strengthened to raise overall awareness in WB possibly through media channels as deemed effective in BD.
Highlights
Inorganic arsenic is a group 1 carcinogen (IARC, 2012) and is considered as one of the top ten chemicals having significant public health concern (WHO, 2020)
The community awareness of the medicine used for treating arsenicosis under the health component (SQ4) in both countries was minimum among the three components
On the use of arsenic-contaminated shallow tube well water for irrigating rice crops (SQ10), we found that awareness levels were high (92–100%) for farming communities of both the countries
Summary
Inorganic arsenic (iAs) is a group 1 carcinogen (IARC, 2012) and is considered as one of the top ten chemicals having significant public health concern (WHO, 2020). A decade later, another similar study by Rahman et al (2014) in Nadia district, reported around 51% of tubewell samples having arsenic above 0.01 mg L-1, with arsenical skin lesions prevalence rate of 7.1%. In Bangladesh, arsenic contents in drinking water of 61 districts (out of the total 64) exceed the WHO’s maximum permissible limit (Chakraborti et al, 2010; Saha et al, 2019). Joseph et al (2015) reported both drinking water and daily foodstuff as principal sources of arsenic exposure for the affected population of the Bengal Delta Plain. Food is reported to play a dominant role over drinking water towards intake of arsenic into the human body (Signes et al, 2008; Liu et al, 2010) and, often, infants and small chil dren are more vulnerable than adults (Carlin et al, 2016; Carey et al, 2018; Menon et al, 2020a)
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