Elements generally occur in their natural form in the Earth’s crust, some important micronutrients while many being absolutely toxic. Arsenic is the twentieth most abundant element and the inorganic form is the most toxic in comparison to certain organic compounds like arsenobetaine and arsenocholine which is tolerated better [1, 2]. In India, cases of arsenic toxicity has been reported mainly from West Bengal and also rivers like Ganga, Bramhaputra, etc. [3]. Groundwater contamination by arsenic continues to remain the major source of exposure in the country leading to cases of chronic arsenic toxicity. Projects on groundwater testing for arsenic undertaken as a government initiative with support from UNICEF has identified many affected regions …show more content…
With a superior platform of ICP-MS used in our laboratory both the drawbacks in arsenic estimation from whole blood was negated. Many studies in India have elaborated on the clinical condition of acute and chronic arsenic toxicity, but very few have actually studied average arsenic levels in the population. Bangladesh and West Bengal have been documented to be worst affected by arsenic toxicity and it has been estimated that 79.9 million are exposed to groundwater contaminated with arsenic from 42 districts in Bangladesh, while from 9 adjacent districts in West Bengal, the number of exposed are roughly 42.7 million [15]. Our study is one of the few to document both frequency as well as average levels of arsenic in whole blood. The frequency of high arsenic levels detected in our study is 1.37% and males were found be affected higher than females at 1.47% and 1.25% respectively. This difference in gender based frequency of high arsenic levels was also found to be statistically significant. Our study also detected maximum affected to be from the State of Kerala and the City of Mumbai in India at 12.6% and 28.5%