ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, BDSPN
It was the 2016 monsoon season when Jenna Forsyth, then a doctoral student at Stanford University, visited the Chowk Bazaar, a vibrant market in Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital. Forsyth and her collaborators ducked into a shop selling every pigment color under the sun. While a downpour lashed outside, fans inside gently blew clouds of colorful dyes around the room. “It’s an incredible sight to see,” reflects Forsyth, now a postdoc at Stanford.
Her trip was part of an international investigation to explain a puzzling and alarming finding: Why were 30 percent of pregnant women living in the Bangladesh countryside showing up with elevated concentrations of lead in their blood? Lead is a known neurotoxin that increases the risk of miscarriage in pregnant women and can pass from the mother’s blood to her fetus, causing health problems and developmental issues once the baby is born. There is ...
