Trend Analysis of Human Health Risk After the Implementation of Centralized Water Supply System in a Fluoride Contaminated Ground Water Dependent Habitat of Eastern India

Abstract Submission: Fluoride, being the thirteenth most abundant element found on earth's surface, is an essential element needed for early dental and skeletal development in the human body. However, chronic exposure to this element in an unsafe limit for a prolonged period of time can have various deleterious effects. So, a Drinking water standard of safe limit of 1.5 mg/L and a permissible limit of 1 mg/L has been prescribed by WHO and ISO. The current study focuses on finding the trend of risk of fluoride exposure in two age groups from 2019 to 2024 by calculating Hazard Quotient (HQ) as suggested by the US-EPA and identification of spatial hotspots with associated inducing socio-economic parameters of previously groundwater-dependent habitat. The maximum HQ value for the younger and older age groups was found to be 6.621 and 4.897 for the year 2019 where, whereas an improvement was noticed in the trend with HQ values of 5.026 and 3.718 for the two groups in the year 2024. A Monte-Carlo simulation was done to evaluate the uncertainty of the health risk calculated. Overall, it can be concluded that the children are more prone to the adverse effects of Fluoride as compared to adults in the study area, and a decreasing trend of HQ was noticed after partial implementation of intermittent, centralized water supply systems by the nodal agencies.
Keywords- Hazard Quotient, Hotspot, Fluoride contamination, Monte-Carlo Simulation

Learning Objectives/Expected Outcome (Optional) : After attending this oral presentation, one can learn about the risk assessment methods, uncertainty analysis, and trend analysis of change in contaminated water sources and subsequent scenarios in a developing country.