Bathing in Well Water With Arsenic

by Gene Franks

showerhead

Is it safe to shower in water that is contaminated with arsenic?

Dr. Kelly A. Reynolds in a December 2016 Water Conditioning and Purificication article on arsenic got my attention in her beginning  paragraph: “Exposure to arsenic via inhalation, ingestion and skin absorption can lead to cancers of the lung, bladder and skin.” I took note because I have been advising our customers for some time that arsenic in well water is mainly a drinking water issue and that there is little or no evidence that exposure to arsenic through bathing in water that is a few parts per billion over the current recommended limit of 10 parts per billion has any serious health consequences. Consequently, when a well water  customer calls or writes with an arsenic issue, we usually recommend taking care of the drinking water, which is easy and not too expensive, and forgoing the much more costly, complicated and often unreliable whole house treatments for arsenic.
Arsenic is serious business and I don’t want to get it wrong, so I did some internet research on the topic: does arsenic, in fact, enter the body through the skin and can it be breathed in during showering?

Most authorities who address the issue of the uptake of arsenic through the skin are pretty clear on the issue.  Here are some examples:

 Unless your arsenic level is over 500 ppb, showering, bathing and other household uses are safe. Arsenic is not easily absorbed through the skin and does not evaporate into the air. — Mass.gov. (A publication of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs) [Five hundred parts per billion is 50 times the EPA recommended allowable.]

Only a minimal amount of arsenic is absorbed through the skin.–   Virginia Dept. of Health.

Arsenic is not easily absorbed through the skin. Maryland Dept. of Health.

For most people, the largest source of arsenic is in the food we eat. Most foods, including vegetables, fish, and seafood, contain some arsenic. Arsenic in groundwater can enter the body by drinking the water or by eating food cooked in the water. Arsenic does not evaporate into the air and is not easily absorbed through the skin. — Illinois Dept. of Public Health.

If your skin contacts soil or water containing arsenic, only a small, harmless amount will enter your body. — Delaware Health and Social Services.
If levels of well water are above 500 parts per billion, you may want to stop using it for bathing, cooking and washing clothes. —North Carolina Dept. of Public Health and Human Services. 

Generally speaking, the main routes of contamination for people who are not exposed to arsenic in their work (occupational exposure) are drinking water first, followed by food. Absorption through the skin seems to be minimal, so arsenic exposure through hand washing, laundry, bathing, etc. is not considered to be a problem. — University of Maine.

Neither the National Research Council (1999) or the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (2000), nor the additional literature searches, identified any controlled studies of inorganic arsenic absorption through human skin. New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Historical studies indicate that skin absorption of arsenic is negligible,  so handwashing and bathing do not appear to pose a known risk to human or animal health.  Greg Reyneke, MWS, Water Conditioning and Purification Magazine, November 2021.

The statements above are typical. Some sources do note, however, that trivalent arsenic (arsenite) can pass through the skin much more easily than pentavalent arsenic (arsenate). A couple of sources say, in fact, by a factor of as much as 60:

 

Dermal uptake of arsenic has been underestimated up to now based on low permeability of arsenate. A new study finds that uptake of arsenic as arsenite or dimethylarsinic acid is a factor of 29 and 59 higher than that of arsenate. — Evisa. 

[Keep in mind that 29 to 59 times almost nothing can still be almost nothing.]

Trivalent arsenic is well absorbed through the skin and is 60 times more toxic than pentavalent arsenic, which is well absorbed by the gut.[1] Arsine gas is highly toxic.–  Patient.  (A UK health professionals reference site.)

No source is cited for the “well absorded through the skin” statement and the end-of-sentence footnote links only to the entry page for a pay-to-use website. Although it is not specified, the admonishment seems to be aimed at arsenic poisoning via industrial pollution rather than water.
 drinkingbathwater
In spite of Dr. Reynolds’ statement and other occasional dissenting views, I still feel good about my standard  recommendation to customers with wells a few ppb over the recommended maximum of arsenic to fix their drinking water and leave the rest alone. As the picture above would suggest, however, if there is arsenic in your water common sense precautions should be taken.

 A brief article on how to remove arsenic from water.

Dam Safety in the US


Posted December 17th, 2016

Are US Dams Safe?

Editor’s Note. The piece below is excerpted and adapted from a Circle of Blue article by Brett Walton.

sanclementedam

If you live downstream from a dam, you hope that someone is maintaining it and monitoring its safety. This is not always the case. In Alabama, for example, all but 10% of the state’s dams are privately owned and regulatory oversight is minimal.

The universe of American dams is expansive. There are tailings dams that hold back a slurry of mine wastes, stock ponds for irrigation or watering cattle, and artificial lakes for sailing and speedboats. There are dams to detain flood waters and dams to filter debris. Then there are the hydropower behemoths such as Grand Coulee and Hoover, symbols of 20th-century engineering might. Though iconic, these canyon-bridging concrete plugs are the minority. Most dams are small structures less than 25 feet tall made of packed dirt and rock and built more than 50 years ago.

Surprisingly little is known about why individual dams fail. Few states do autopsies to learn precisely what went wrong. That is why a Stanford University professor founded the National Performance of Dams Program in 1994. The program’s goal is to learn from past failures so that managers can identify problems before they become tragedies. The program’s researchers have found that the U.S. dam industry is far behind the nuclear power and oil and gas pipeline industries in the amount of data it collects.

Not every dam failure is judged by the same criteria. The United States has a three-tier rating system that classifies a dam based on the destruction resulting from failure. The rating system is used to set design standards; the greater the risk the stricter the codes. Low-hazard dams are expected to cause minimal property damage. It is considered acceptable if these dams, as long as they are accurately categorized, fail because the risks to life and property are low. Richland County, South Carolina notes that several of its dams will fail in a 50-year flood. Significant-hazard dams are a step up. They might destroy infrastructure or cause severe property damage if breached. The most worrisome category is high-hazard potential. A rupture at one of these dams could kill people.

A new risk on the industry’s radar is climate change but engineers are still trying to figure out how droughts and severe storms will affect dam performance.

“Climate change is not doing dam safety a benefit at all,” one authority said. “We know it will change risk but it has not been quantified yet.”

Eric Halpin, deputy dam safety officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said that the key variable is how a dam’s engineering responds to sharp shifts in weather.

“We’re living off the investments of two to three generations ago,” Halpin said. “Those dams have the science and engineering of their times embedded in them. The pace of change today doesn’t get easier. It gets harder in the future: back to back wettest years followed by five years of drought. All this has an impact on dams.”

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Hyponatremia


Posted December 4th, 2016

Hyponatremia, or Water Intoxication

waterintoxication

Drinking too much water left a woman with a urinary tract infection seriously ill, and doctors said water intoxication can kill you. The case in point is a 59-year-old London woman who, in an attempt to “flush out her system,” drank water so copiously that she developed hyponatremia, also called water intoxication.

According to the Mayo Clinic:

Hyponatremia is a condition that occurs when the level of sodium in your blood is abnormally low. Sodium is an electrolyte, and it helps regulate the amount of water that’s in and around your cells.

In hyponatremia, one or more factors — ranging from an underlying medical condition to drinking too much water during endurance sports — causes the sodium in your body to become diluted. When this happens, your body’s water levels rise, and your cells begin to swell. This swelling can cause many health problems, from mild to life-threatening.

 

Hyponatremia is marked by an abnormally low level of sodium in the blood. Sodium helps regulate the quantity of water in and around cells.

There is a death rate of nearly 30 percent for patients whose sodium level drops drastically below normal. The condition can involve vomiting and significant speech difficulties.

The treatment may require medication, but usually it can be corrected simply by restricting water intake. Recovery may take a week or longer.

“The old adage to ‘drink plenty of water’ should be approached with caution if you are not vomiting, or experiencing diarrhea, or excessive sweating,” advised one doctor. “Your thirst is often the best guide to gauge when you think you need to drink more water if you have no history of kidney disease.”

Other signs of water intoxication include headaches, nausea and vomiting, confusion, loss of energy and fatigue. The illness can cause the brain to swell, coma, seizures and death.

People with normal kidney function who sometimes develop water intoxication are endurance athletes who drink more water while exercising than their kidneys can excrete.

Although doctors commonly advise patients with many ailments to “drink plenty of fluids,”  little evidence supports the recommendation. There are definitely both risks and benefits to increased fluid intake.

Reference: Tucson News was the original source, but the article itself is no longer available.