NATURAL ALTERATIONS OF WATER QUALITY BY LOW-RANK COALS: HUMAN HEALTH CONSEQUENCES (Invited Presentation)

Adverse health impacts associated with alterations of water quality are almost invariably linked to anthropogenic effluents from mining, farming, industrial, and municipal activities. However, water quality alterations by the natural environment can have substantial and wide-spread health consequences. For example, ground water percolating through low-rank coal (lignite) beds or through aquifers that are in communication with lignite beds extract a wide range of organic compounds such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, aromatic amines, aliphatic compounds, etc. Ingestion of this water may contribute to widespread kidney disease and urinary tract cancers. This syndrome, first recognized in the former Yugoslavia where it is called Balkan endemic nephropathy, may have caused the deaths of as many as 100,000 people in Yugoslavia during a 30-year period starting in the 1950s. It has been suggested that this lignite-water syndrome occurs in the U.S. Gulf Coast (where this groundwater supplies drinking water to as many as 3.5 million people) and in the Northern Great Planes. States containing lignite deposits have some of the highest incidence of renal pelvis cancer mortality. In east Texas the counties underlain by lignite-associated aquifers have end stage renal disease rates are two to three times higher than in adjacent counties drawing surface water and water from aquifers not associated with lignite deposits. Significantly, there is no difference between the regions in the incidence of diabetes, the main cause of kidney failure. Similar relationships exist in Louisiana, Arkansas, and North Dakota. While not conclusive, these relationships indicate that ingestion of water containing organic compounds extracted from low-rank coals may be an important contributing factor for idiopathic kidney disease.