University of Melbourne's Dr Dora Pearce is urging for more testing of soil and water in central Victoria's Goldfields region to address the possible threat of cancer caused by arsenic. She has worked on research examining the link between elevated levels of arsenic caused by historic gold mining and cancer in the region.
The researchers looked at 20 years of data (1984 to 2003) from the Victorian Cancer Registry and a measure of soil arsenic from the University of Ballarat and GeoScience Victoria. It found people living near areas such as old mines and mine waste dumps are 1.2 times more likely to get cancer.
Dr Pearce said exposure to arsenic, a known human carcinogen, had been linked to lung, colon and bladder cancers. “Because arsenic is naturally occurring where gold mineralization occurs, when people mine they bring up the gold ore containing arsenic and it is concentrated in large dumps of waste,” Dr Pearce said.
Dr Pearce said free soil and water testing would help people to address the risk. “What I personally would like to see would be that local governments make some provision for people to have their soil and water tested and give people ... advice on what to do with it if they do find a potential problem,” she said. “This is historical waste we are talking about, so nobody is to blame.” She said the waste particularly threatens children. “Children are particularly vulnerable to exposures, mostly because they are the ones out there playing in the dirt…I myself live in the Goldfields region and often I've seen kids running over some of the mine waste dumps just playing. So they are the ones that are potentially at risk,” she said. She suggested parents reduce children's exposure to high-risk areas and that gardeners bring in clean topsoil for vegetable plots.
The paper is published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.
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