The material histories of food quality and composition.

This article argues for material histories of food. In recent decades food historians have tended to emphasize the cultural factors in consumption, in addition to the already well-established social, political and economic perspectives, but what is still missing is the stuff in foodstuffs. With reference in particular to milk and wine, the suggestion here is that physical and chemical composition is a major influence in what we might call the biographies of particular items of food and drink.

Application of geostatistics with Indicator Kriging for analyzing spatial variability of groundwater arsenic concentrations in Southwest Bangladesh.

This article seeks to explore the spatial variability of groundwater arsenic (As) concentrations in Southwestern Bangladesh. Facts about spatial pattern of As are important to understand the complex processes of As concentrations and its spatial predictions in the unsampled areas of the study site. The relevant As data for this study were collected from Southwest Bangladesh and were analyzed with Flow Injection Hydride Generation Atomic Absorption Spectrometry (FI-HG-AAS).

Arsenic risk mapping in Bangladesh: a simulation technique of cokriging estimation from regional count data.

Risk analysis with spatial interpolation methods from a regional database on to a continuous surface is of contemporary interest. Groundwater arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh and its impact on human health has been one of the "biggest environmental health disasters" in current years. It is ironic that so many tubewells have been installed in recent times for pathogen-free drinking water but the water pumped is often contaminated with toxic levels of arsenic.

Social implications of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh.

Besides its toxicity, groundwater arsenic contamination creates widespread social problems for its victims and their families in Bangladesh. There is, for instance, a tendency to ostracise arsenic-affected people, arsenicosis being thought of as a contagious disease. Within the community, arsenic-affected people are barred from social activities and often face rejection, even by their immediate family members.

The spatial pattern of risk from arsenic poisoning: a Bangladesh case study.

Arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh has been one of the biggest environmental health and social disasters of recent times. About seventy million people in Bangladesh are exposed to toxic levels of arsenic (0.05 mg/L) in drinking water.