Ahmedabad, September 2: ARSENIC poisoning, that bane of industrialisation,has left many crippled across the country. Yet, testing food and ground water for arsenic content remains rare thanks to the prohibitive cost of the equipment involved.  Now here is some good news.

  Thanks to the innovation of an Ahmedabad-based researcher, an instrument that will test arsenic content in water, food substances, clinical samples-blood,urine etc for as little as 20 paise per sample is likely to hit the market soon.

The man behind the innovation, Dr Y K Agarwal, Head of Chemistry Department, Gujarat University, is at present working in collaboration with SG Australia, a multinational, in developing an instrument which will make use of his methodology.  "Once I am through with the instrumentation part, I will apply for patent," he says. According to him, not only will the machine he designs will be considerably cheaper than the ones already in the market, it will also be able to detect arsenic even in minute quantities. Agarwal claims his instrument can detect arsenic content as less as 10 pppb (permissible parts per billion), while the others can detect arsenic only if there is 50 pppb.

    "The new methodology will also enable us to extract arsenic by washing the arsenic absorbed by the polymer. In the other testing methodologies, arsenic cannot be retrived," he said. He says apart from SG Australia, US-based Eurbon Chemical Company and World Health Organisation had evinced interest in his invention and offered help in making it commercially viable.  Agarwal is working with a polymer compound polycalixerene.  "Scientists across the world are working with this compound, but I'm the first one to use it for detecting arsenic in liquids." Agarwal conducted this research in GU's Chemistry laboratory in collaboration with four professors and two research scholars.

    "The arsenic detection methods available in the market now are costly. For example, Inductive Couple Plasma Mass Spectrography (ICPMR) instrument costs Rs 30 crore, while the Hydride Atomic Absorption method instrument costs around Rs 30 lakh.  The instrument which I am developing will cost only about Rs 10 lakh and the cost per sample test will be as low as 20 paise," said Agarwal. For his research work, Agarwal has tested samples collected from West Bengal, Rajnandgaon village in Chattisgarh and Ropar where the problem of arsenic in drinking water is acute. "I made public my research work for the first time in the Sixth Internatonal Conference on Arsenic at San Diego in July 2002, where I presented a paper. After the publication of the conference proceedings a lot of enquiries poured in about my work. Offers of help came even from the Texas University," he said.

Talking about health hazards of arsenic, Agarwal said, "According to WHO standards, presence of arsenic above a limit of 50 ppb in food and water is dangerous. It causes skin related problems, tumours, cancers and bone-related problems."

Arsenic usually finds its way into the food chain through pesticides and release of untreated industrial effluents that contaminate ground water.