Arsenic poisoning could be history with low-tech water filter

• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientist Ashok Gadgil is developing a cheap and effective way to provide safe drinking water to 60 million Bangladeshis who live under the specter of arsenic poisoning.
• His idea is to create arsenic filters from coal ash, the fine gray powder that piles up at the bottom of furnaces at all coal-fired power stations, waiting to be discarded.
• "It's just coal ash, nothing fancy," says Gadgil, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab and its Environmental Energy Technologies Division.
• Arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh has been called one of the largest mass poisonings in human history, expected to cause 10 percent of all future adult deaths in the impoverished nation of 130 million.
• For reasons not entirely understood, the shallow tube wells that people depend on for water have dangerous concentrations of the toxic substance which, if ingested over long periods of time, leads to debilitating lesions, cancer, and death.
• Water drawn from any one of the millions of contaminated wells that dot Bangladesh could then be poured through the filter and safely consumed.
• In November, he received an award from San Jose's (CA) Tech Museum of Innovation, which honors people who use technology to help humanity, for developing a water purification system that kills bacteria with ultraviolet light.
• He needed a material that has a high surface-to-volume ratio, is pathogen-free, and is available in large quantities at low cost.
• After obtaining some ash from India, he assembled Team Arsenic, which includes fellow Berkeley Lab scientists Lara Gundel, Yanbo Pang, Christie Galitsky, Duo Wang, and Anna Blumstein.
• After spiking lab water with so much arsenic that its concentration soared to an extremely toxic 2400 parts per billion (ppb), the filter lowered the water's arsenic concentration to 10 ppb.