Impact of Lead Contamination on Agroecosystem and Human Health

Abstract

Environmental threat due to toxic heavy metals is of prime concern worldwide. Rapid urbanization, industrialization and other developmental activities including anthropogenic activities (e.g. mining, fossil fuel burning) are the major contributors of heavy metals above the prescribed permissible limit. High concentration of heavy metals has detrimental impact on soil, water and air as well as human and animal health. Heavy metals exert toxic effects on soil microorganism hence results in the change of the diversity, population size and overall activity of the soil microbial communities. Heavy metal toxicity influences all soil microbial activity that involves change in the microbial population, diversity, their size and growth. Loss of soil fertility results in reduced crop yield and imbalance nutrition due to presence of excess amount of metals. Lead is non-biodegradable highly toxic heavy metal present in the environment. Elevated Pb in soil causes to decrease of soil productivity and impair with various soil enzymatic activities. Lead contaminated soil created several chronic health implications (carcinogenic) or even to death of the living organisms via food chain contamination. Lead is considered as one of the potential carcinogens which can damage cardiovascular, kidney, brain, gastrointestinal tracts, low IQ, loss of hearing or multi-organ failure in humans. Lead toxicity causes several health hazards like everlasting brain injury, hearing loss, learning disabilities, behavioural abnormalities in children while in adults it comes with hypertension, blood pressure, heart disease, and so on. Lead pollution also has severe threat to the aquatic living organisms. In this chapter, a brief overview about the lead with its various active form, source of contamination and impact on agroecosystem, human and animals has been described in details.