Education Fosters Action: Community Science Advances Arsenic Abatement in Maine and New Hampshire

Short abstract

High school students and teachers paired with researchers improved awareness, drinking water testing, and abatement in high-risk areas.

The bedrock in much of New England contains naturally high levels of arsenic,¹ which means the region’s well water as well can have high concentrations of the toxic metalloid.² Municipal governments must ensure that public drinking water is within safe limits established by regulatory agencies,³ but New England residents who rely on private wells—like other well users across the United States—are responsible for their own testing and treatment.⁴

Although more than half of Maine residents surveyed through the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (https://www.cdc.gov/brfss/index.html) in 2021 said they used private well water for drinking, only 56% of them reported testing their water for arsenic.⁵ These low testing rates, combined with the many health effects of arsenic exposure,⁶ led Jane Disney, an environmental health scientist at MDI Biological Laboratory in Maine, to begin thinking about a project to boost private well testing and encourage local residents to drink safer water.

The students in New Hampshire and Maine collected 3,070 water samples across both states for testing, as shown right. Approximately 24% of them were found to have arsenic concentrations greater than $5\text{\hspace{0.17em}ppb}$, left. Images: Taylor et al. (2024).¹⁴

Even low to moderate arsenic exposure in drinking water has been associated with elevated cancer risk (especially bladder cancer) in New England residents.⁷ Other studies have linked arsenic exposure to reduced birth weight⁸ and cardiovascular,⁹ immunological,¹⁰ and dermatologic conditions.^11,12 “Arsenic is such an important public health issue. I thought maybe we could increase testing rates by getting students involved,” says Disney.

The result of her brainstorm was a community science project called All About Arsenic (https://www.allaboutarsenic.org/), which pairs researchers with science teachers in areas of Maine and New Hampshire, especially in areas at risk for elevated arsenic. Students sample water from their own homes and their neighbors’ and send the samples to a reference lab for testing.¹³ In a recent paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives,¹⁴ Disney reported the results of the students’ work over the period 2016–2022.

The students collected 3,070 water samples for testing, approximately 24% of which were found to have arsenic concentrations greater than $5\text{\hspace{0.17em}ppb}$, New Hampshire’s maximum contaminant level for arsenic in drinking water.¹⁵ Lab testing revealed that 14.8% of the wells had concentrations greater than $10\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}ppb}$, the maximum level for drinking water set by the US Environmental Protection Agency¹⁶ and adopted by Maine.¹⁷ Student data also revealed that many homeowners did not know whether their home had a water filtration or treatment system, nor whether those systems removed arsenic. Post-study interviews revealed that the program and test results spurred some homeowners to install or improve their arsenic removal systems.

Disney says project leaders shared the testing data with state health agencies. “We more than doubled the number of samples that had been taken over decades in these communities,” she says, “and we were doing it [essentially] overnight.” Projects like All About Arsenic are important not just for their research findings but also for their ability to engage the public in the scientific process, says Terrence Collins, who was not involved in the study. Collins, who directs the Institute for Green Science at Carnegie Mellon University, says, “The more ‘citizen policemen’ that we have to try to prevent bad-actor chemicals from getting into the home, the better.”

All About Arsenic is a form of community-engaged research in which local residents—in this case students—participate in research studies by helping to plan experiments, gather and analyze data, and disseminate results.¹⁸ As this project demonstrates, such work can improve testing rates of private wells and educate residents about the harmful effects of arsenic in drinking water.¹⁹ The authors wrote that “the sheer number of samples collected by students has, for some municipalities, doubled or more than doubled the amount of publicly available data on [arsenic] in wells.”¹⁴

First author Ashley Taylor, left, and second author Alexis Garretson, center, work with Disney, right, who is the principal investigator of the project. Images: MDI Biological Laboratory, left, right; The Jackson Laboratory, center.

The sheer extent of drinking water contamination around the world far outstrips the existing testing capacity of professional scientists and regulatory authorities, says Alexander van Geen, a Lamont Research Professor in geochemistry at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The importance of remediating contamination in affected communities and stimulating public interest in addressing the problem makes a program like All About Arsenic perfectly suited to fill the gap, says van Geen, who was not involved in the study.

“If you want to know where the exposure comes from, it’s not enough to have a biomarker,” says van Geen. “Testing is the first step towards avoidance and mitigation. … I’m hoping that [these results] might have a psychological impact, that it will prepare people to take action.”

Disney piloted All About Arsenic in 2016 in 7 middle and high schools. Between 2018 and 2023, another 19 schools were added to the ongoing project. Science teachers at the schools develop lessons around arsenic and other toxic elements, their origins and health effects, and data analysis.

Jon Ramgren, a participating high school science teacher in Waterville, Maine, likes that the project helped his students learn about scientific methods, as well as understand the importance of preventing toxic exposures. “The students learned that real science wasn’t just a cookbook activity,” he says. “The data mattered. If you didn’t do it right, you could mess up the whole project.”

Biography

Carrie Arnold is a public health journalist from Virginia.