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Study and health risk assessment of the occurrence of iron and manganese in groundwater at the terminal of the Xiangjiang River

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Abstract

The pollution of the surface water in the Xiangjiang watershed in China has received much attention, whereas the groundwater conditions in the area have long been ignored. This study investigates the occurrence of Fe and Mn in the groundwater of Chengxi Town located at the terminal of the Xiangjiang River. The study area was monitored for an entire year. Thereafter, the associated health risks were identified. Results showed that approximately 81 and 73 % of the measured samples exceeded the limits for Fe and Mn in Chinese drinking water, respectively. pH level was found to be negatively correlated with the concentrations of Fe and Mn in the groundwater in the study area. The occurrence of Fe in the groundwater showed significant seasonal fluctuations and was possibly affected by the change in environment conditions within the aquifer. By contrast, Mn remained relatively stable in most of the area during the whole year. Overall, no health threats for adults and children in the study area were determined according to the low health index values. Nevertheless, research attention and the implementation of relevant measures are needed for certain villages with exceptionally high Mn concentrations in the groundwater.

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Acknowledgments

The study was funded by the “Hundred-talent Project” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (A315021407), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41271294), and the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-09-330).

Compliance with ethical standards

The manuscript has not been submitted to more than one journal for simultaneous consideration.

The manuscript has not been published previously (partly or in full).

A single study is not split up into several parts to increase the quantity of submissions and submitted to various journals or to one journal over time.

No data have been fabricated or manipulated (including images) to support the conclusions.

No data, text, or theories by others are presented as if they were our own. Proper acknowledgments have been given, quotation marks are used for verbatim copying of material, and permissions are secured for material that is copyrighted.

Consent to submit has been received explicitly from all co-authors.

Authors whose names appear on the submission have contributed sufficiently to the scientific work and therefore share collective responsibility and accountability for the results.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, CAS and MWR, Yangling, 712100, China

    Bin Huang & Zhongwu Li

  2. College of Environmental Science and Technology, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China

    Bin Huang, Zhongwu Li, Guiqiu Chen, Chang Zhang, Xiaodong Nie, Weiping Xiong & Guangming Zeng

  3. Key Laboratory of Environment Biology and Pollution Control, Ministry of Education, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China

    Bin Huang, Zhongwu Li, Guiqiu Chen, Chang Zhang, Xiaodong Nie, Weiping Xiong & Guangming Zeng

  4. South China Institute of Environmental Science, Ministry of Environment Protection, Guangzhou, 510655, China

    Zhiliang Chen

  5. Department of Soil and Water Conservation, Yangtze River Scientific Research Institute, Wuhan, 430010, China

    Jinquan Huang

Authors
  1. Bin Huang
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  2. Zhongwu Li
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  3. Zhiliang Chen
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  7. Xiaodong Nie
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  9. Guangming Zeng
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Zhongwu Li or Zhiliang Chen.

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Huang, B., Li, Z., Chen, Z. et al. Study and health risk assessment of the occurrence of iron and manganese in groundwater at the terminal of the Xiangjiang River. Environ Sci Pollut Res 22, 19912–19921 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-015-5230-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-015-5230-z

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