Women in Pabna, rural Bangladesh, carry drinking water in large containers. (Photo: Molly Kile)

Fighting a war of independence should be turmoil enough for a small country, but in 1970, the people of Bangladesh also had to deal with a deadly cholera outbreak. This water-borne disease threatened the country’s plentiful surface water and put public health at risk. To solve this crisis, the government, together with international aid agencies, dug thousands of wells. But the clean water they hoped to deliver created a new crisis, what one researcher calls the largest mass poisoning on the planet.

Fast-forward 20 years. Symptoms of arsenic toxicity were beginning to appear in the population. Skin lesions were misdiagnosed as leprosy and led to social exclusion. Worse, skin lesions are a potential precursor to cancer.

Molly Kile, an environmental epidemiologist at Oregon State University, and her Harvard mentor David Christianie first traveled to Bangladesh in 2003 to study the health effects associated with arsenic in drinking water. “Our efforts have largely been understanding the epidemiology (of arsenic exposure) and the human health risk associated with it,” says Kile. She first traveled to Bangladesh as a doctoral student at Harvard and has returned more than 20 times.

Molly Kile studies the health impacts of environmental contaminants. (Photo courtesy of Molly Kile)

Scientists know that exposure to high levels of arsenic can lead to cancer, but Kile, an assistant professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences, wants to know how the metal affects other aspects of health, such as reproduction and child development. Local groups, she says, can effectively translate her results into disease prevention, but many participants in her research are among the most vulnerable in the country.

“By and large, the populations that are affected by arsenic in Bangladesh are the rural populations,” she says, “and about 60% of Bangladesh lives on less than $2 a day. So these are places of absolute poverty.”

Reproductive health effects stem from the fact that the toxic metal crosses the placenta and exposes the fetus. Low birth weight and spontaneous abortions have been associated with arsenic exposure in utero. Kile also uses genetics to look for variations among individuals that increase or decrease susceptibility to skin lesions.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of arsenic is its invisibility. “You can’t taste arsenic. You can’t smell it, you can’t see it, you have no idea its there unless you test for it,” she adds.

Binding Arsenic

Not being able to detect arsenic by sight or taste has raised the stakes for communities that lack the resources to test or treat their drinking water. Kile’s favorite way to test for arsenic in people may come as a surprise: the human toenail.

Toenails are composed of keratin, which contains chemical combinations of sulfur and hydrogen called sulfhydryl groups. As arsenic in the body binds with these sulfhydryl groups, it accumulates in the toenail.

“So keratin is mostly sulfhydral, as is your hair,” says Kile. “Any inorganic arsenic that is circulating in your body will want to bind to a sulfhydral group. So your toenails, your hair, and even your skin all come into equilibrium with the arsenic in your body. You can take a toenail clipping, and you get a lovely integrated exposure of what that person has been exposed to.”

Molly Kile met with residents of Dhaka Community Hospital to discuss her studies of arsenic exposure. She and her team ask what concerns people have and recruit participants in their research. Their findings are then shared with the community. (Photo courtesy of Molly Kile)

Kile calls the health crisis in Bangladesh a preventable disaster. Arsenic was known to be present in large parts of western Asia, but that wasn’t considered in the 1970s when the country transitioned to groundwater.

“And it was seen as the public health triumph of its day, only to find out that it’s now the largest mass poisoning on the planet,” says Kile. “That’s one of the messages of this: This was completely preventable.”

Research elsewhere suggests that as exposure declines, skin lesions may go away with time, but such studies are still in progress.

Despite Kile’s start with arsenic being half-a-world away, the issue isn’t so far from home. She calls Oregon “arsenic country” and has been conducting water-testing workshops in communities east of the Cascades. In the United States, technology can remove arsenic from drinking water. So far, there have been no arsenic-related health problems recorded in Oregon.

“It really is across Oregon,” she adds. “Eugene, Salem…and across the border too. This is a Pacific Northwest Issue.”

Scientists estimate that up to 100 million people are exposed to elevated levels of arsenic in Bangladesh alone. Whether you are drawing from a well in Bangladesh or Oregon, researchers like Kile are racing to fully understand the impacts of this invisible contaminant.

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Listen to a podcast with Kile.

For more information about arsenic in drinking water in Bangladesh:

D. van Halem, S. A. Bakker, G. L. Amy, and J. C. van Dijk, “Arsenic in drinking water: a worldwide water quality concern for water supply companies,” in the Journal Drinking Water Engineering and Science, 2009,

Manouchehr Amini; Karim C. Abbaspour; Michael Berg; Lenny Winkel; Stephan J. Hug; Eduard Hoehn; Hong Yang; C. Annette Johnson; “Statistical Modeling of Global Geogenic Arsenic Contamination in Groundwater,” Environ. Sci. Technol.  2008, 42, 3669-3675.t © 2008 American Chemical Society

Chowdhury, M. A. I., Uddin, M. T., Ahmed, M. F., Ali, M. A. and Uddin, S. M.: How does arsenic contamination of groundwater cause severity and health hazard in Bangladesh, J. Appl. Sci., 6(6), 1275-1286, 2006

Gary Klinkhammer (Photo: Susan Klinkhammer)

“The Arctic in a lot of ways is more like a big lake than an ocean. It’s more isolated,” says Klinkhammer, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. “Following carbon in the Arctic turns out to be a very powerful thing,” he adds, because it can reveal details about the chemical and geological processes that drive ocean life.

But Klinkhammer felt hampered by his equipment. His analytical tools could produce a lump-sum measurement of carbon, not a detailed picture of the dissolved and particulate forms that emanate from sources such as forests or farms, peat bogs or cities.

Following his Arctic expedition, he got to work on a better way to analyze water quality. What he learned about tracking carbon and other materials led him to create a Corvallis-based technology company that is advancing water-quality protection in the United States and abroad.

Today, in addition to his role as director of the W. M. Keck Collaboratory for Plasma Spectrometry at OSU, Klinkhammer is founder and chief scientific officer of ZAPS Technologies, which designs and sells an analytical system, LiquID™, based on his research. Through optical analysis of flowing water, the system can rapidly monitor over 100 constituents in water-supply and wastewater systems and the environment.

“If you’re looking at the Santiam River or something like that, you don’t really know where that carbon is coming from,” he says. “Some of it’s coming from groundwater. Some of it’s coming from a reservoir. There are multiple sources that it can come from.”

Illustration by Teresa Hall

Pinpointing the identity and source of organic matter and other constituents is a critical step in protecting public health. For example, storms and floodwaters can pollute drinking-water supplies with sediment and disease-causing microbes. One of the most famous cases occurred in 1993 when the microbe cryptosporidium contaminated the drinking-water supply of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that more than 400,000 people got sick and 69 died.

Klinkhammer’s analytical innovation provides both rapid optical analysis and online display of data. It monitors chlorophyll, algae, E. coli and other materials 24/7 in real-time. It can even track inorganic materials such as nitrate, chlorine and ammonia.

Currently, ZAPS employs more than 20 people and has installed monitoring systems in Corvallis, Albany, Seattle and Lafayette, Indiana. Others are scheduled for San Diego and Australia.

Klinkhammer started working with sensors as a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island. His goal then was to locate hydrothermal vents on the vast mid-Atlantic ridge. In his research, he has used water-quality analysis to locate hydrothermal vents in the Antarctic and to understand chemical processes in the oceans, including the Columbia River plume off the Oregon coast.

Inside the Hinkle Creek Project

Hinkle Creek researchers are measuring water flows, trapping insects, tracking fish and monitoring amphibians.

Read more…

To the list of problems for watershed research, add dam-building beavers. Last fall, in the rippling waters of Flynn Creek near the Coast Range town of Toledo, Oregon, scientists had placed a probe to take continuous measurements of dissolved oxygen. When the instrument shut down abruptly, hydrologist George Ice went to check. “I saw that the cord was cut,” he says. “A beaver had gnawed it off and stuffed the probe into its dam.” The amused vendor, the Hach Company, provided a free replacement.

Ice and other researchers are updating a pivotal forest science project in Flynn Creek and the surrounding Alsea River watershed. Here, from 1959 to 1973, scientists conducted the first comprehensive forest watershed study in North America. “That was a very important, seminal piece of work,” says Arne Skaugset, Oregon State University hydrologist and director of the Watersheds Research Cooperative. “It set the standard for stream temperature research. It was one of the few watershed studies that had a robust fisheries component.”

The results provided the scientific basis for forest management regulations and contributed to the Oregon Forest Practices Act

In the 1960s, studies of Alsea River watershed logging led to the nation’s first water-quality regulations on forest management. (photo courtesy of the Oregon Forest Resources Institute)

of 1971, the first in the nation to address water quality protection. Back then, harvesting activities weren’t particularly kind to aquatic systems. Fish-bearing streams were literally buried in wood debris, says Ice. Logs might be dragged across or even down channels without regard for the bed and banks. Loggers sometimes removed and burned debris because of concerns that it would impede fish movement. Without riparian vegetation to hold soil and shade streams, sedimentation and water temperatures increased.

But the Alsea study, which documented the consequences of those operations, has become outdated by the modern practices — riparian buffers, better road-building techniques, debris treatment — that it helped to set in motion. “We really need to evaluate how today’s forest practices are working,” says Skaugset. “We have results from these original studies, but the old data are not terribly relevant for what’s going on right now.”

To update the scientific basis for forest management practices, teams of scientists from OSU, federal and state agencies have joined forest landowners in a three-pronged initiative. In the watersheds of the Alsea River, Trask River (east of Tillamook) and Hinkle Creek (east of Sutherlin in the Cascades), they are installing monitoring equipment and collecting water-quality data. They are measuring water flows, sediment concentrations and changes in water chemistry and stream temperature. In headwater streams and below tributary junctions, they are evaluating aquatic food webs by studying organisms from the smallest midges and stoneflies to the steelhead, salmon and cutthroat trout that have run in these waters for eons.

At Hinkle Creek, scientists and landowners are evaluating the impact of contemporary logging practices on water quality. (Photo courtesy of the Watersheds Research Cooperative)

These aren’t majestic, old-growth tracts. They are the kind of working industrial forests that comprise just under half of Western Oregon’s forestlands. For scientists and land managers, the questions are about more than the complexity of forest ecosystems. They’re also about balancing environmental quality with economic value, the health of fish populations with tree harvesting, the quality of water downstream with the need to build roads in steep terrain.

“We’re always developing new management tools,” says Ice, who received his Ph.D. at OSU in 1978 and works for an industry-supported environmental science organization, the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement. “Now we’re looking at more subtle questions: Where and how wide should those buffers be? What types of road systems should we install? Can we enhance streams by opening portions of the stream (to sunlight) or putting wood in those channels to increase productivity?”

Reliable answers to such questions will take time. In the Trask River Watershed, studies began in 2006, and harvesting won’t occur until 2012. In the Alsea watershed, monitoring has been conducted off and on since 1959, and no harvesting is projected until 2009 or 2010. However, at Hinkle Creek, the first answers are starting to trickle in. Three master’s students have completed their theses on summertime stream temperatures, cutthroat trout survival and down-stream propagation of temperature effects. Scientists have accumulated five years of data at nearly 50 locations. In the winter of 2005-06, the landowner, Roseburg Forest Products, cut the first trees, and researchers are beginning to analyze stream ecosystem changes.

“We’re passionate about science-based forestry,” says Phil Adams, timberlands manager for the company. “We understand the need for regulation to protect water and fish resources in Oregon through our Forest Practices Act. As we go forward, it needs to continue being efficient and based in science.”

The 4,534-acre Hinkle Creek watershed was last harvested in the 1940s. A continuing round of cuts is planned for the South Fork, but Roseburg Forest Products has agreed not to harvest trees on the North Fork until 2011, thus leaving it as an undisturbed control.

The experimental design is known as paired watersheds. During the pre-harvest phase, researchers confirmed that the two watersheds can be used as predictors of each other. To date, researchers have installed nearly a quarter-million dollars’ worth of equipment.

In the winter of 2005-06, the company harvested 380 acres in five units in the South Fork, enough to deliver 3,281 truckloads of logs to local mills. Harvest blocks were located in non-fish-bearing headwaters, where regulations do not require riparian buffers. Next winter, harvesting operations are scheduled for land along downstream fish-bearing reaches.

Batteries Not Included

When Kelly Kibler was looking for graduate schools, the Pacific Northwest caught her fancy. Within days of arriving in Corvallis in June 2005, the dreadlock-wearing forest engineering master’s student from North Carolina hustled down I-5 to Sutherlin to join Skaugset’s hydrology crew at Hinkle Creek. Mornings began with loading sample bottles, fluorescent dye, batteries and other gear into a pickup. Once past a yellow gate a half-hour outside of town, the crew left the pavement on Roseburg Forest Products’ gravel logging roads.

Kibler threw herself into the project, serving as a crew member and focusing her own thesis on water temperature impacts from logging. “It was exactly the kind of work I wanted to do. Multi-disciplinary across the sciences, physical and ecological, policy and management. Pretty applied. Just the ticket,” she says.

Working with Skaugset, Amy Simmons (faculty research assistant), Tim Otis (master’s student in forest engineering) and Nick Zegre (Ph.D. candidate, forest hydrology), Kibler helped to maintain computerized water-sampling devices and data recorders that monitor water temperature. She ran tests on water samples containing fluorescent dyes to determine how much groundwater was entering streams. She carried 40-pound marine batteries sometimes as far as a half-mile from the road to keep equipment operating. She reached under slash, logging debris left over headwater streams, to take measurements of light reaching the water.

For her master’s thesis, Kibler analyzed stream temperature profiles in six streams, four located just below clearcuts in the South Fork and two in the unharvested North Fork. She controlled for changes in weather and other conditions and compared data from pre- and post-harvest periods. Her findings were mixed and unexpected. In the South Fork, daily maximum temperatures dropped in one stream, rose in another and remained unchanged in two. However, mean temperatures decreased in all four, possibly reflecting the influence of slash cover and increased groundwater flow into the streams. Branches left by logging operations cast shade over the streams roughly equivalent, she found, to the original tree canopy cover. “Without that slash, all four streams might have been significantly warmer after harvest,” says Kibler.

Moving Targets

In addition to being a research lab, Hinkle Creek provides an educational setting for more than 600 Roseburg fifth-graders who visit the watershed every year, says consulting forester Javier Goirigolzarri. High school students and the Oregon Board of Forestry have also toured the research sites.

“The Watersheds Research Cooperative is probably the leading effort (in the United States) to look at the effectiveness of contemporary practices,” says Ice. The future of forest policy is at stake. Results from the Hinkle Creek, Alsea and Trask projects may guide regulation as attention is focused more on watersheds than on single pollutants, more on how watersheds respond to disturbance than to whether pollutants such as sediment and organic materials exceed a threshold level.

“Sediment, temperature, dissolved oxygen and nutrients are highly variable in time,” says Skaugset. “You can go out to a highly degraded watershed and collect a water sample at the right place and time, and it would look great. If you go out into the middle of the Santiam Wilderness Area during the middle of a large winter storm, there will be muddy water. So you have to capture that variability if you want to look for changes due to timber harvesting.”

“It’s a very tough problem,” he concludes. “All three of these studies and other studies in the Pacific Northwest are right on the forefront.”

Contact the WRC at watershedsresearch.org, 541-737-1348

Measuring flow rate and and stream height reveals how water moves through the landscape. Researchers are also tracking stream sediment loads using the next generation of computerized water-sampling devices. Arne Skaugset’s water-quality lab analyzes more than 2,000 samples per year from the Hinkle Creek, Trask, Alsea and Oak Creek (near Corvallis) watersheds.

Insects

Aquatic insects serve as water-quality indicators and as food for fish and other animals. Judith Li, retired professor of fish and wildlife, and two research assistants, Bill Gerth and Richard van Driesche, are evaluating insect populations and life-cycle patterns. Pre-harvest monitoring reveals a stream ecosystem that is “in pretty good shape,” says Gerth. Adds Li, “After comparing the first samples post-harvest, we may be observing shifts in patterns of drift and emergence associated with logging.”

Fish

Steelhead and cutthroat trout are on the move, and a team led by Bob Gresswell and Doug Bateman of the U.S. Geological Survey (both have courtesy appointments at OSU) is tracking them throughout the watershed. PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder) tags inserted into almost 2,000 fish make them register like groceries at the checkout counter every time they pass one of 30 electronic gates. The tag “allows us to see without really harassing the fish, whether they are selecting different kinds of habitat,” says Bateman.

Amphibians

Pacific giant salamanders are the most abundant amphibian species in Hinkle Creek streams. Working with John Hayes of the University of Florida and Mike Adams of the U.S. Geological Survey, Ph.D. student Niels Leuthold in the Department of Forest Science has been surveying in both the north and south forks to determine occupancy rates. By combining results of hydrology, insect and fish studies, researchers hope to resolve questions about the impact of harvesting on amphibians.