Health Risk Assessment of Children Exposed to the Soil Containing Potentially Toxic Elements: A Case Study from Coal Mining Areas

Abstract

Coal mine activities lead to the release of potentially toxic elements (PTEs) to the surrounding areas. The present study concerns the health risk caused due to the exposure of PTEs (Hg, As, Cd, Cr, and Pb) in the children residing in the areas around coal mines. The PTEs content and bioaccumulation coefficient (BAC) in the plant, viz., Albizia lebbeck and Madhuca longifolia growing on the nearby soils of the coal mine affected areas were also estimated. The results demonstrated that the hazard quotient (HQ) for Cr (0.211) in the roadside soil (RSS) was higher than other PTEs. The hazard index (HI) was also at the maximum in the RSS (0.553) followed by the core zone soil (0.541). In RSS, Cr contributed the maximum for the HI value (38%) which elucidated that Cr might cause health problem in the long term. The Cr concentration (5.49 mg kg−1) was also higher than other PTEs in the plant leaves of M. longifolia and was two-fold higher than A. lebbeck. Except Cd, the accumulation of other PTEs in the leaves of both the species were low, which could be due to their low availability in soils. The BAC for Cr in M longifolia was comparatively higher than A. lebbeck and was found at the maximum for Cd (0.29) in M longifolia. The outcomes of the study elucidated that although there is no severe health risk in children, the data indicated that the prolonged exposure to PTEs might lead to serious health issues.

Harnessing sulfate-reducing bacteria with plants growing to revitalize metal-tainted coal mine soils in Midwest China: metal sequestration performance, ecological networking interaction, and functional enzymatic prediction

“…As presents a distinct pattern, with AD and PS, its immobilization is enhanced, with the oxidizable fraction in soil combined with SRB and AD at 23.66%, higher than the 4.64% in SRB-only soil. A significant portion of As is in the oxidizable form, potentially linked to As 3+ , a common species in coal mine-affected soil ( Raj et al, 2022 ). Pb in soil with SRB shows a high residual form of 75.98%.…”

Assessment of risk perception by toxic metals in calcareous soil: evaluate environmental and health fate using multimodal statistical approach

“…Given that rice is a staple food in the Indian diet, a safe threshold for FIAM-HQ in staple foods (rice) was set at 0.5. Table S2 showed that the average FIAM-HQ values for Cr, Ni, Pb, Cu, and Cd were all below this safe threshold (FIAM-HQ < 0.5) (Raj et al, 2022). Therefore, it is recommended for human consumption to include rice grown in the agricultural soils of the calcareous soil zone studied.…”

Evaluation of Energy Utilization Efficiency and Optimal Energy Matching Model of EAF Steelmaking Based on Association Rule Mining

“…The encoder provides a low-dimensional representation of the extracted features, that is, the latent variable Z. The decoder decodes Z and obtains the reconstructed representation of the data AE(X) as in Equations ( 27) and (28).…”

“…Data mining is widely applied in various fields, such as the biomedical field and the field of energy construction, by domestic and foreign scholars. It extracts rules from complex data, discovers association patterns between different features, and achieves functions such as fault diagnosis [25,26], behavior prediction [27,28], pattern recognition [29,30], and disease research [31,32]. Data mining also has some successful applications in the iron and steel industry.…”