October 28, 2006
Text Messaging for Safe Water
In Bangladesh, arsenic poisoning occurrs naturally in about 50% of private tube wells, reports World Changing, putting people who drink the water at risk.
"Despite warnings from the government, many villagers cannot afford to dig tube wells deeper than 40ft. They continue to install shallow tube wells at a fast pace.
Lex van Geen and his colleagues at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University are working to reduce the exposure to arsenic through their development of an SMS - accessible database to best inform communities of how deep to drill their wells to avoid arsenic.
A pilot project incorporated data from 300,000 wells into the Welltracker database, which reports for each village the number of wells tested, the proportion of unsafe wells and, when available, the start depth together with an estimate of the probability that the estimate is correct. "
Picture left from UCLA, "digging a well in Bangladesh".
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2006/10/013938.htm
