article · Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Cyanobacterial blooms produce hazardous microcystins that threaten agricultural production when contaminated lake water is used on farms. A field study in the Lalla Takerkoust agricultural area near Marrakesh, Morocco, evaluated the health risks associated with raw water containing microcystins used for watering farm animals and irrigating fruit crops. Microcystins were quantified in water and fruit samples using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays to establish health risk indicators. The findings revealed that using this water source created severe health risks for farm animals, with estimated daily intakes exceeding safe limits by fourteen times for poultry and nineteen times for horses. Furthermore, microcystins bioaccumulated in pomegranates, generating estimated daily intakes twenty-two times above safe thresholds for adults and fifty-three times higher for children. These risks indicate an urgent need for agricultural water guidelines and remediation interventions.
Using untreated surface water tainted by toxic cyanobacterial blooms can inadvertently introduce dangerous toxins into the human food supply. Because microcystins bioaccumulate in irrigated fruit and pose severe health risks to livestock, both farming output and public health are threatened. Understanding the scale of this contamination helps agricultural authorities and communities recognise the dangers and establish safe standards for farm water use.
This research highlights a clear demand for nature-based water filtration and toxin removal solutions suited for irrigation and farm animal watering in regions prone to cyanobacterial blooms. The primary end users would be farming enterprises, irrigation managers, and rural agricultural authorities. The work is currently at the stage of risk assessment and problem definition, meaning that any commercial remediation technologies would still require development, prototyping, and testing under real-world farm conditions.
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Abstract The health risks linked to the consumption of microcystin-accumulating crops have been increasing worldwide in toxic cyanobloom-occurring regions. The bioaccumulation of microcystins (MCs) in agricultural produce at environmentally realistic concentrations is poorly investigated. In this field study, we assessed the health risks of MCs in raw water used for irrigating fruit crops (bioaccumulation) and watering farm animals in the Lalla Takerkoust agricultural region (Marrakesh, Morocco). Thus, MCs were extracted from water and fruit samples and quantified by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay in order to calculate the health risk indicators. MCs posed a high health-risk level to poultry and horses, with estimated daily intakes (EDI) being 14- and 19-fold higher than the recommended limits (3.1 and 2.3 μg MC-LR L −1 ), respectively. Furthermore, pomegranate posed the same level of risk, with EDI being 22- and 53-fold higher than the limit dose (0.04 μg MC-LR kg −1 ) for adults and children, respectively. There was an urgent need for guidelines regarding water use and management in MC-polluted areas, besides the setup of nature-based tools for toxin removal from raw water used in farming practices. Moreover, MCs could contaminate the human food chain, which implies further investigations of their potential accumulation in livestock- and poultry-based food.
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DOI: 10.1007/s11356-023-27914-1
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