How Could The Crusades Change A Serfsã¢â‚¬â„¢ Life

The environmental chemist and his wife and research partner, Erika Mitchell, PhD, have devoted much of their research careers to studying arsenic, manganese, and other toxic heavy metals establish in drinking water and, more recently, babe formula. What they know is frightening. Far scarier are the outdated government regulations meant to protect us

BY SEAN MARKEY
NORWICH Record | Leap 2021

Nearly every day brought the same parade of man misery. Foot lesions. Paw lesions. Torsos and backs rippled with melanoma. In far-gone cases, gangrene or unseen internal malignancies, including float, liver, and lung cancers and vascular disease. Some victims were infants and children as young as one and a one-half years one-time. The bulk were adults—older, but rarely very former. "I walked into one village where no one was over 30 years old," Seth Frisbie, PhD, recalled. The ill didn't know the true crusade of their suffering. Some thought it was leprosy. Others suspected witchcraft. One thing was for certain, though. Death was stalking the villagers of Bangladesh.

But a brilliant Indian dermatologist working in neigh-boring West Bengal correctly tied the melanosis and other symptoms to chronic arsenic poisoning. Tens of millions of Bangladeshis were drinking water contaminated with dangerous levels of arsenic and other unknown heavy met¬al toxins. In 1998, Frisbie was on a quest to identify that anonymous rogue'due south gallery of poisons and their range across Bangladesh. A blue-neckband plumber turned Ivy League PhD, he crisscrossed the country with a government tourist agency driver-cum-translator and a lab assistant from the International Eye for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dakha. Riding in an agency-upshot rental car with no air conditioning, two horns, and right-manus steering wheel that echoed the country's British colonial by, the ecology chemist was on an urgent mission to solve a public health emergency.

The previous year, the scientist had been part of a United States Bureau for International Development (USAID) project to produce the first national survey of arsenic in the country's drinking water, virtually of it drawn from 10 million deep, groundwater tube wells first dug in the 1970s. Some suggested the source of the arsenic came from wooden power poles supplied by the United States. But arsenic from such a source would seep just a few anxiety and couldn't explicate why Frisbie and geologist Don Maynard were finding the carcinogen as much as 900 anxiety underground and a dozen miles abroad. The arsenic was everywhere. The 2 investigators suspected the source was geologic.

That wasn't the only problem in the water. Borrowing a lab at the national cholera hospital in Dakha, Frisbie conducted tests that suggested the presence of other previously unidentified toxic metals. Without better equipment, yet, Frisbie had no thought what those additional contaminants might be or how widespread. Frisbie and Maynard had little doubt, however, that the health implications for tens of millions of people in Bangladesh were dire.

Frisbie and Maynard were so alarmed they approached representatives from the Bangladesh government, the World Health Organization, the European Spousal relationship, and the Globe Bank. They even traveled to Washington, D.C., after returning to the States to speak with USAID staff.

"People only didn't get it," Frisbie said. Discoveries in science are usually a thrill, but in this case, it created an unimaginable brunt that wore heavily on the Cornell-trained chemist. "Here he had discovered this huge problem and he couldn't discover anyone who was willing to listen," said Erika Mitchell, PhD, his wife and long-time enquiry partner.

The one person who finally did mind was Bibudhendra Sarkar, PhD, a researcher at the University of Toronto and The Hospital for Sick Children. An expert in metal-caused diseases, Sarkar had discovered the first treatment for Menkes syndrome, a rare and fatal affliction caused by copper assimilation that, left unchecked, kills newborn children within their outset 4 years of life. Sarkar introduced Frisbie to belittling chemist Richard Ortega, who shared a keen interest in the effects of heavy metals on man health. Based at the Academy of Bordeaux in French republic, Ortega had access to an enviable lab of specialized equipment, including the university's high-resolution imaging particle accelerator, i of only a few dozen instruments like it in the world. If Frisbie could gather the field samples, Ortega would analyze them. Working together, Frisbie, Ortega, Sarkar, and Mitchell hoped to reveal the cocktail of heavy metals poisoning the h2o supply of millions in Bangladesh.

With no time to waste, the scientists decided to fund the research themselves. Frisbie and Mitchell both quit their existing jobs in the U.S. so Frisbie could devote the side by side year to field inquiry in Bangladesh. To back up the project, Mitchell, who holds a PhD in linguistics and understands 15 languages, presently landed a job educational activity English at Zayed Academy, a start-up college for Emirati women in Dubai in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. The couple plowed most of her salary into their enquiry.

Taking the advice of a colleague in Dakha, Frisbie timed his field piece of work for Ramadan, when Muslims throughout the land would fast from sunup to sundown, a time when chronic ceremonious unrest in the land calmed. Like his hosts, Frisbie fasted and refused water during the twenty-four hours. At night, he would collapse from sheer exhaustion, often sleeping through the evening meal. After iv weeks, he had lost 20 pounds.

Frisbie and his two companions visited 3 or four villages a twenty-four hours, some only attainable by foot, reached via a dirt path or past balancing atop the dikes of rice paddies. Upon entering, Frisbie would sample local wells and enquire to meet the hamlet elder. He would soon find himself seated in the center of the customs, as residents described their suffering. Fifty-fifty normally modest Muslim women came forward to expose skin malignant with cancer. Chronic arsenic poisoning tin be reversed if it's caught in time, but merely before it manifests equally cancer or severe vascular disease. Otherwise, the metallic continues to accrue in the proteins in the skin and begins to destroy blood vessels throughout the entire trunk, leading to gangrene and far worse cancers in the body'south internal organs.

"These people were desperate. They were sick and they had no idea why," Frisbie said. The villagers he spoke with were grateful to see someone who cared, who knew what was happening, and who offered some solutions to their problem.

Just his fieldwork was paying off, providing the water samples and mapping data he and his colleagues were looking for. At his lab in Bordeaux, Ortega began analyzing the water Frisbie flew back from People's republic of bangladesh. Sample subsequently sample confirmed the same grim results. Half of the state's 120 million people were drinking water with unsafe concentrations of arsenic. Another 60 million people were drinking water with unsafe concentrations of manganese, a strong neurotoxin, with some overlap between the two groups.

The presence of manganese was particularly troubling. An essential nutrient in trace amounts, in higher exposures manganese becomes toxic. Only recently have scientists begun to understand its effect as a powerful developmental neurotoxin in children, one linked to lower IQs, impaired memory function and bookish skills, attending arrears hyperactivity disorder, trigger-happy beliefs, and a welter of other behavior and attending bug.

The discovery marked the first time that manganese had been identified in drinking water and found to be broad-spread, and information technology gave the researchers pause. "There were four people on Earth who knew that there might exist another toxin in Bangladesh's drinking water," Frisbie said. How could anyone walk away from a problem like that? Frisbie and his colleagues knew they could never live with themselves if they did.

"Nosotros had no idea what Seth would find in Bangladesh and how important this would be," Mitchell said. The more they discovered, the more the scientists found there was to learn and bring to the world's attention. "It was just opening a tin of worms, and we dove correct in."

Photo: feet damaged by chronic arsenic poisoning Frisbie and Mitchell spent v years in Dubai, in all, with frequent return trips to Bangladesh. The researchers proposed a testing strategy to the government of Bangladesh that could provide prophylactic drinking h2o to 85 percent of the population: Wells with arsenic levels sufficiently low enough to be considered safe by Bangladesh government standards would exist painted greenish. Wells considered unsafe would be painted cherry. For the remaining 15 pct of the population, water could be treated or sourced from newly dug, safer wells.

The couple also founded a nonprofit, Ameliorate Life Laboratories, in 1997, which continues to operate today. Information technology provides research, technical preparation, and equipment to help people in People's republic of bangladesh and other underserved regions admission safer drinking water.

Today, the scientists focus much of their inquiry energy on topics related to drinking water and public health, especially the safety standards national governments and global health organizations set for naturally occurring heavy metals in groundwater.

Frisbie, who joined the chemistry faculty at Norwich in 2006, is a sought-later on skilful in the field, one who has ad-vised the Canadian government on its drinking water safety standards for copper and uranium. He has also pointed out math errors in drinking h2o standards set by the World Health Organization. Frisbie and Mitchell collaborate with colleagues at MIT, the Harvard School of Public Health, and other institutions on projects effectually the world, from Nepal, India, and Rwanda to S America, Honduras, and the United States. Susan Murcott, a research engineer and lecturer at MIT'south D-Lab, who works on global water, sanitation, health, and climate change issues and is a frequent collaborator, describes him as a "world class" pharmacist.

One of the more recent lines of enquiry undertaken by the married man and wife research team has been the manganese content in powdered infant formulas then-called toddler "follow on" drinks marketed to parents of children under historic period three. The parallels to their early on feel in Bangladesh has, at times, been unsettling. Only instead of tens of mil¬lions of impoverished people living in a far-away state in Southern Asia, the exposed population are infants and toddlers in the Us and France.

In a serial of iii landmark papers, the latest of which was published earlier this year, the scientists shared the results of a yr-long enquiry sabbatical in France working with their friend and long-time collaborator Richard Ortega. One of the challenges in analyzing powered infant formula is its insolubility. (This may seem counterintuitive to parents, but from a chemistry perspective, it is true.) Standard chemical analyses using traditional instruments doesn't work well. Which may explicate why such studies are novel. It also shows where having a colleague based at the University of Bordeaux with access to a warehouse-size, multimillion-dollar, high-resolution imaging ion beam particle accelerator called PIXE at the Bordeaux-Gradignan Center for Nuclear Studies comes in handy.

As with the all-time telescopes in the world, research time on PIXE is competitive and coveted. During their year-long breather, Frisbie and Mitchell only had a week of "beam fourth dimension," and fifty-fifty then had to share fourth dimension with other scientists working on other projects. Using PIXE, Frisbie and Mitchell'south team analyzed the manganese content of 44 brands of powdered infant formula and toddler drinks bought off the shelf in the Us and France. The formulas reflected a range of drinks derived from soy, rice, chocolate, cow'southward milk, and goat's milk-based protein.

Tell-tale Ten-ray and Rutherford backscattering signatures revealed that manganese levels in the products were 32 to 1,000 times greater than that found in natural chest milk. The worst offenders were supplemented with manganese salts, such equally manganese chloride, manganese citrate, manganese gluconate, or manganese sulfate. A vital nutrient in the faintest trace corporeality, manganese is also a toxic metal. But in the final xv to 20 years has the research community begun to fully understand its function as a stiff neurotoxin on child encephalon development and, more than generally, on adults.

According to Maryse Bouchard, a researcher and professor at the University of Montreal's School of Public Health, school-historic period children with elevated manganese levels accept been found to accept lower IQs, impaired memory function and academic skills, lower visual-spatial ability, impaired motor office, dumb olfactory function, and atypical brain structure or part. High manganese exposure is also linked to increased hazard of attention arrears hyperac¬tivity disorder, behavior, and attending issues.

In adults, manganese can cause Parkinson's-like tremors, liver and kidney damage, hearing loss, trigger-happy behavior, and depression. Research has shown that the hair of fierce offenders in California contains college levels of manganese than control groups.

Every bit humans, our demand for manganese is and then infinitesimal that we acquire it in sufficient amounts simply from the dust in the air nosotros exhale, Frisbie notes. For nursing infants, their mother'south natural chest milk is an ideal source of manganese.

Yet, a forty-yr-old regulation by the federal Food and Drug Administration written in 1980 notwithstanding governs the manganese content in infant formula sold in the United States. It requires a minimum of 5 micrograms of manganese per 100 kilocalories of infant formula, approximately five times the concentration of breast milk. In Europe, the standard is 1 microgram per 100 kilocalories, which approximately equals the concentration of breast milk.

Most troubling, however, is that U.Due south. regulations set no maximum ceiling or limit on the amount of manganese that manufacturers can add together to baby formulas and related products. As a event, many announced to accept followed the erroneous approach that "if some is healthy, more must exist better," calculation tens if not hundreds times more manganese that necessary. In light of their studies, Frisbie and Mitchell have urged that all manufacturers cease adding supplemental manganese to infant formula.

Their findings highlight the grave disconnect that frequently exists between science and the latest research and regime regulators. As Frisbie and Mitchell wrote in a recent paper, "Evidence-based public policy often comes years or decades after the underlying scientific breakthrough."

"What nosotros're seeing over and over once again is that many of these regulations that have been designed to protect public health are based on outdated science that'southward sometimes 40 years old or even older," Mitchell said.

"It's a very underserved area of science," Frisbie said. "Regulations get gear up and they become written in stone. They don't seem to change as science advances."

In late 2019, subsequently they published their offset paper on manganese in infant formula, Frisbie and Mitchell reached out to the office of U.South. Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vt.) with the aim of alerting legislators and the FDA to the risks posed by excessive manganese in baby formula. Iv hours after they submitted a constituent web query, a PhD biochemist on Welch'south staff called them at domicile. Finally, people were paying attention. (In February of this year, an unrelated U.South. Congressional report characterized heavy metals in baby food as "highly unsafe." That written report, plus a self-report on heavy metals in baby food, requested past the FDA from large U.S. producers, suggest greater regulatory scrutiny if not a wholesale overhaul may finally be on the horizon.)

In January, the couple learned that their latest newspaper, a critical review of international regulations relevant to manganese ingestion in infants, had been accepted by The Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology. Full of technical detail and dense assay of the scientific studies used past the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, World Health Organization, European union, and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to gear up limits for manganese in drinking water, it is non exactly coffee table material. Merely it'south the kind of work that ane might expect people in the right places, i.e., the staffs of our government representatives and federal regulatory agencies, to read and pay attending to. At least, i would hope.

As the scientists point out in their paper, excavation to detect the original research upon which government regulations are based, in this case manganese, often reveals old and outdated studies. Often they offering "very picayune scientific ground" to guide regulation, Mitchell says. The Institute of Medicine (since renamed the National University of Medicine), for example, set the upper limit for the ingestion of manganese on a single Canadian study from 1982. "They did a dietary survey for 3 days of a hundred university women," Mitchell says. "What did you lot swallow for nutrient? Okay, the [person] who ate the virtually manganese, that's the upper limit. They didn't mensurate whatever health outcomes. They didn't fifty-fifty measure weight in this dietary study. And then, in that location was no thought of how long the exposure had been going on. They didn't measure or expect for any wellness outcomes for either the low ingestion levels or the high ingestion levels. Looking at the entire written report, in that location was … probably around 10 women [who] supposedly ingested 10 milligrams per day, with no measurements of whether or non this affected their wellness. And the IOM used this to fix an upper limit [for manganese]. So the Earth Wellness Organization used the IOM figure for setting their drinking h2o regulation."

One of the other major takeaways from Frisbie and Mitchell's work is that prophylactic standards used by rich and poor countries to govern the amount of arsenic in drinking water is often non governed by the amount that is deemed safe, or reasonably and then, for humans. Rather it is often set at the minimum level that nearly laboratories tin easily discover. To put that some other way, information technology is like setting the speed limit around school zones at 80 m.p.h. simply because our law don't have better radar detectors.

Photo: Boy with melanosis caused by chronic arsenic poisoning When he left high school, Frisbie didn't imagine he would nourish higher. He trained briefly as machinist and, later, as a plumbing apprentice, going to work for his parents' plumbing business in Marshfield, Mass. 1 day, while working on a chore at an area infirmary, a piece of Sheetrock fell from the ceiling as Frisbie reached for a tool. The slab made "a perfect on-edge karate chop" confronting his spine. Seriously injured, Frisbie couldn't walk for three days and was sidelined for months afterwards. His orthopedic surgeon refused to operate, assertive there was an equal chance he would brand matters worse, not better. The doctor told Frisbie he needed to find a unlike line of piece of work, one where he used his encephalon instead of his back.

Frisbie followed that advice and ignored his father'southward— who thought college was an escape for young people avoiding life—and put himself through the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His finances were so tight, he could only afford the college's x-meal-a-week dining programme. He would consume ii meals a day during the calendar week and fast on weekends. If he fabricated tea, he would save the bags and consume the leaves within. If he had dined better, he may never have met his future wife. "I saw this guy gorging himself on Friday nights, eating 2 or three meals in one sitting," Mitchell recalled. "I thought, what is going on here?" The two got to talking and when Mitchell realized the tall freshman didn't accept enough to swallow, she started bringing rice and beans to him in his dorm room on Sabbatum nights.

Frisbie's academic skills were rusty at first. Just he soon proved himself to be an outstanding student, graduating amidst the elevation 12 students in his unabridged form and earning a scholarship to attend graduate schoolhouse at Cornell. Mitchell followed him there, writing her 900-folio doctoral thesis on Finno-Ugric languages. After graduation, Frisbie worked as a pharmacist at three dissimilar engineering firms, until his experience in Bangladesh forever altered the course of both their lives. Every bit Frisbie likes to joke now, he rescued his wife from a life of prosperity.

I of his biggest challenges today is time. "I take more work than I tin do in a hundred years," he says. Pedagogy at Norwich to train and inspire the next generation of chem¬istry leaders is one way Frisbie hopes to solve the problem.

U.S. Ground forces Medical Corps 2nd. Lt. Gregory Wilkins '18, is a former student now in dental school at NYU. Wilkins describes Frisbie as a committed educator and dedicated mentor who involves students in consequential inquiry. Every bit an undergraduate, Wilkins spent iii years helping Frisbie build a novel musical instrument to discover arsenic in drinking water at concentrations a thousand times lower than that detected past most routine laboratory tests.

Frisbie's other projects include an cheap spectrophotometer designed in collaboration with electric and calculator engineering science Prof. Michael Prairie, PhD. While commercial devices run many thousands of dollars, their instrument uses merely $64 in parts. The price point has opened new applications in many low-income countries, including projects to test drinking water for uranium in India and to screen patients for diabetes in Honduras.

Quondam biochemistry major Kenneth Sikora '16, who is at present studying for his medical degree at Dartmouth's Geisel Schoolhouse of Medicine, says coming together Frisbie during a campus visit in high school was what inspired him to attend Norwich. He describes his erstwhile professor and mentor equally a model of "scientific excellence and integrity, empathy, service, and upstanding responsibility."

Thomas Bacquart, a French enquiry scientist based at the National Physical Laboratory in England who has collaborated with Frisbie over the years, says Frisbie'southward work is distinguished by its innovation and cutting-edge ideas. While the trend in research today is to tackle increasingly complex and esoteric areas of enquiry, Frisbie's are always grounded in a practical focus on improving the well-beingness of people. Striving "to link authentic and pertinent scientific research with actual man life improvements is probably what … impress[es] me most when I look at Dr. Frisbie'south work," he notes.

"I tell my students who are interested in public health that you have the potential to benefit many millions of people and that you lot also have the potential to damage many millions of people," Frisbie said. "The people who advocated to install these deep-water wells in Bangladesh—without testing a single drib of water for naturally occurring metals—did this with the best of intentions. Notwithstanding, they did not think information technology through, and this has caused tremendous suffering for people."

As research couples go, Frisbie and Mitchell are exceptionally well matched. Frisbie can exist phenomenally detail focused. "A spreadsheet with a thousand datapoints, and he sees the one with the typo," is how Mitchell puts it. While Frisbie tackles the extremely difficulty chemistry questions, Mitchell delves deeply into literature reviews around the health aspects of their research. "She sees the big picture," Frisbie says. "Information technology has happened over and over. I've been immersed in the minutiae and she understands the significance of what we're doing."

Ane of the more intriguing ideas that Mitchell has landed on recently is the effect that drinking h2o drawn from deep underground has on human health. Over the course of human development, our species has relied most exclusively on drinking water drawn from lakes, rivers, streams, and other surface water sources. While such sources can be rife with affliction caused by parasites and bacterial pathogens, they do offering an reward when it comes to naturally occurring heavy metals. Exposed to oxygen, many of these metals become insoluble and precipitate out of the water.

Just, as Mitchell points out, three technological revolutions that occurred within the span of just seven years in the mid-1800s sparked a tipping point that would irrevocably alter where most of the world'south population obtained their drinking water. A source we didn't evolve to consume. The first innovation came during the London cholera outbreak in 1854, when a scientist by the name of John Snowfall conceived the germ theory of illness, suggesting correctly that cholera was transmitted past bacteria that contaminated drinking water. The 2nd innovation came only two years subsequently, also in England, when inventor and engineer Henry Bessemer devised a new, cheap way to manufacture steel. The last innovation came during the Civil War in the Us, when Spousal relationship Army officer Col. Nelson W. Green drilled deep, steel tube wells to tap water in underground aquifers to supply safe drinking water that wouldn't spread dysentery and other diseases among his soldiers.

Water sourced from deep underground is now a major source of drinking water for much of the world's population. "For the showtime fourth dimension in our evolutionary history, a large number of us are drinking deep well water that can't collaborate with the oxygen gas in the atmosphere. The deep well water often has naturally occurring metals at high concentrations," Frisbie says. "This has been an uncontrolled experiment that humans have been participating in for 150 years."

As that experiment continues, Frisbie and Mitchell will continue to answer the call to utilise science to help people find safety water to drink.