OVER 100,000 Balkan villagers may have died from kidney failure brought on by
toxic chemicals seeping into their well water from shallow coal deposits.
Robert Finkelman of the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, has found
that well water in regions where people suffer from Balkan endemic nephropathy
has elevated levels of organic poisons such as polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons.
First recognised in 1956, the condition affects villagers aged 40 to 60 in
valleys along tributaries of the Danube. Unlike most victims of kidney failure,
only about 20 per cent of them have high blood pressure, but 40 to 50 per cent
get normally rare urinary-tract cancers. The disease appears to affect some
villages but not others nearby.
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Villagers get their water from shallow wells. And when Finkelman’s team
carried out tests in wells in the former Yugoslavia, it found that toxic
chemical concentrations are higher in water from affected areas than from
unaffected areas nearby. That argues for a geological cause, he told a meeting
of the Geological Society of America last week in Boston.
The leading suspects are geologically reactive coal deposits called lignites.
Unlike other coals, the young Balkan lignites release large amounts of
potentially toxic organic compounds into groundwater. Villagers tap the
contaminated water when they drill shallow wells into the nearest aquifer.
Problems like this could lurk unrecognised in other rural areas with similar
coals, Finkelman warns. He says Greek and Turkish villages, which also use well
water, are the most likely to be affected. This kind of coal is also found in
Japan and France, but residents probably won’t have problems because they drink
municipal water, which is unlikely to accumulate the poisons.
But David Long of Michigan State University believes coal might not be the
culprit. He studied a similarly affected area in Bulgaria, and failed to find
any correlation with coal deposits. But he did find higher levels of arsenic and
molybdenum, and lower levels of selenium, in well water. Some wells also had
exceptionally high levels of nitrates. The two groups plan to compare notes to
try to resolve the issue.