Assessment of Drinking Water Collected from Refugee Camps in India for Toxic Lead and Copper Levels by Flame Atomic Absorption Spectrometry

Water is one of the many contaminated natural products which are consumed by humans. Contamination of drinking water with toxic metals like Lead and Copper has been studied by earlier researchers by different methods of sample preparation and analysis. Both lead and copper produce adverse health effects when taken by the body in excess.

In India, there are many refugee camps; the source of drinking water in these camps being natural ground water or tap water. Since assessment of drinking water at various places has been done earlier, we decided to assess drinking water supplied to Pakistani Hindu Refugees and Tibetan Refugees for toxic lead and copper levels.

Flame atomic absorption spectrometry has been used for quantitation of lead and copper. Standard addition method has been used for analysis. The recovery of spiked samples in case of lead (99.4%) and copper (98.4%) showed that the method is reliable for the determination of trace amounts of lead and copper in water samples. In Pakistani Hindu Refugee camp, lead concentration in tap and ground water was found to be 1.46 ± 0.0058 μg/l and 1.48 ± 0.0058 μg/l respectively, whereas, copper concentration was found to be 1.28 ± 0.0058 μg/l and 1.29 ± 0.0173 μg/l respectively. In Tibetan Refugee Camp, the tap water had lead and copper concentration as 0.61 ± 0.0100 μg/l and 0.63 ± 0.0252 μg/l respectively as determined by flame atomic absorption spectrometry.