Spatial groundwater quality and potential health risks due to nitrate ingestion through drinking water: A case study in Yan’an City on the Loess Plateau of northwest China

By Peiyue Li, Xiaodong He, Wenyu Guo. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, 2019

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This research was carried out to delineate the spatial distribution of shallow groundwater quality in Yan’an City, an important cultural city on the Chinese Loess Plateau, and to estimate the health risks induced by nitrate exposure in drinking water in this city. For this study, 36 shallow groundwater samples were collected from shallow pumping wells/dug wells. The entropy-weighted water quality index (EWQI) was used to evaluate the overall groundwater quality, and the spatial distribution of the groundwater quality was discussed. The potential health hazards due to nitrate intake through drinking water were also assessed. The results of the study demonstrate that the main hydrochemical facies are governed by natural processes and anthropogenic activities. Over half of the groundwater samples require treatment of different degrees before being consumed. TH, TDS, SO42–, and NO3– are the most prevalent contaminants affecting the groundwater quality in this area. Poor-quality water is prevalent in the region along the main river. Residents in almost half of the study area face noncarcinogenic health risks with children being the more susceptible group to groundwater nitrate contamination. Reducing the concentration of NO3– in drinking water by regulating excessive fertilizer application and issuing regulations supervising the domestic sewage are important to reduce the health risks. Integrated management of groundwater and surface water as well as rainwater is recommended for the groundwater quality management.

Subfields: Geochemistry and Petrology, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1301179e3191156c6ee48cecdfdd50c61006c36

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1. Song He
2. Rui Tian
3. Jianhua Wu

Citations in the corpus

• Groundwater quality appraisal by improved set pair analysis with game theory weightage and health risk estimation of contaminants for Xuecha drinking water source in a loess area in Northwest China (2019, background): “The risks due to consumption of nitrate contaminated water have also been estimated and reported by Su et al. (2013), He et al. (2018), Li et al. (2019), and Adimalla and Li (2018), which have all shown that children are associated with significantly higher risk than adults.”
• Relationships of groundwater quality and associated health risks with land use/land cover patterns: A case study in a loess area, Northwest China (2019, background): “Schematic illustration of (a) searchlight shaped model (Yan et al. 2016) and (b) curved streamline searchlight shaped model. contaminants may pose health risks on human body through various pathways (Li et al. 2019, 2017b; He and Wu 2018).”