查看文章

Most people in Ghana have no or only basic access to safely managed water. Especially in rural areas, much of the population relies on groundwater for drinking, which can be contaminated with fluoride and lead to dental fluorosis. Children under the age of two are particularly susceptible to the adverse effects of fluoride and can retain 80–90% of a fluoride dose, compared to 60% in adults. Despite numerous local studies, no spatially continuous picture exists of the fluoride contamination across Ghana, nor is there any estimate of what proportion of the population is potentially exposed to unsafe fluoride levels. Here, we spatially model the probability of fluoride concentrations exceeding 1.0 mg/L in groundwater across Ghana to identify risk areas and estimate the number of children and adults exposed to unsafe fluoride levels in drinking water. We use a set of geospatial predictor variables with random forest …