Millions poisoned by wells dug to save lives

The WHO expects the high death toll over the next two to three years as a result of long-term exposure to polluted water which is being drunk from shallow tube-wells.

The poison, which occurs naturally in the soil, causes skin lesions as well as cancers of the skin, lungs, kidney and bladder, and many other diseases. Arsenicosis has already killed hundreds of people in the region.

Allan Smith, a WHO consultant and professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley, called the poisonings "a terrible public catastrophe".

"Bangladesh is grappling with the worst mass poisoning of a population in history," he said.

Smith, who has visited Bangladesh many times, said the scale of this environmental disaster was "beyond the accidents at Bhopal, India, in 1984, and Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986".

"We still don’t know how many millions have been exposed and at what levels," said Smith, but the estimate is from 35 million to 77 million.

Dipankar Chakraborti, a researcher at Calcutta’s Jadavpur University, said at least 30 million people in Bangladesh and five million more in eastern Indian states were drinking water with arsenic contamination at 50 parts per billion (ppb) - five times the WHO’s permissible limit.

"In Bangladesh and India, tens of thousands of people are still drinking water from those tube-wells where arsenic levels have reached 50 to 100 times the WHO’s permissible limit," Chakraborti said.

"WHO set the permissible level of arsenic in drinking water on the presumption that the average person consumes two litres of water per day. In tropical Bangladesh and India, the average daily consumption of water per person is four litres. This means that people here can safely drink water that contains no more than five ppb of arsenic."

According to an estimate by Chakraborti, at least 200,000 cases of debilitating skin lesions are believed to have already occurred in West Bengal and Bangladesh.

In a Unicef and World Bank-sponsored campaign during the 1970s, 10 million shallow tube-wells were drilled in Bangladesh and everyone was advised to drink water from them to protect themselves from water-borne diseases such as cholera. But the switch from traditional dug wells to tube-wells in 1993 has proved fatal to many.

The resulting illness is also having in impact on society where ‘arsenic divorces’ are common. Kalpana Mondal is typical of the victims of the poisoning. She had a happy family life until the calluses started appearing on her skin three years after her marriage. Soon, sores lacerated her palms and wart-like growths developed on her feet. She began walking with a limp and most members in her husband’s large extended family in the village near Calcutta refused to accept food from her disfigured hands.

After examining her, doctors diagnosed arsenic poisoning and said it was caused by drinking contaminated water in her native village on the India-Bangladesh border since childhood. Her husband and some of his relatives said the disease had left her "so ugly" that she could not live with the family anymore. Some neighbours believed she had leprosy, a disease that brings immediate isolation in Hindu society. Soon, the 30-year-old woman was sent back to her parents with her one-year-old daughter, and her husband said she could only return to him if she were cured.

Now, as her illnesses take away her ability to work, Kalpana lives like a beggar in the home of her widowed mother, depending on the charity of relatives and others.

"If my daughter were not with me, I would have committed suicide by now," she said.

Subhash Dutta, an environmental activist in Calcutta said: "Hundreds of such ‘arsenic divorces’ have taken place in India and Bangladesh in the last decade. In some cases, the ostracised women committed suicide. There are thousands of young women who cannot be married because of the ‘ugly’ marks of arsenicosis they carry."

Last month, as a team of Indian, Bangladeshi and British scientists claimed to have solved the mystery of how groundwater becomes contaminated with arsenic, hopes have risen of finding an easy way to cleanse it over a vast region.

In a report published in Nature, scientists said they had found bacteria that can strip naturally occurring arsenic from the soil, which then leaches into groundwater.

But many public health experts are sceptical of the scientists’ findings.

"Unless they happen to invent an airtight method and we find it widely useful and economic for the poor masses in the region, the news of such discovery is meaningless to us," said Nazma Rabbani, an executive of the Bangladesh Arsenic Control Society.

In 2001, a court in London heard a petition from a group of Bangladeshi arsenic victims who demanded compensation from the British Geological Survey [BGS] for its failure to detect high levels of arsenic in groundwater in Bangladesh which endangered their lives.

On behalf of the Bangladeshi claimants, British lawyers argued that the BGS was negligent in not testing the groundwater for arsenic when they conducted a pilot project assessing the toxicity of the water in central and north-eastern Bangladesh in 1991 and 1992.

It was also argued against the BGS that since arsenic was found in groundwater in neighbouring West Bengal, that common sense dictated that the water in Bangladesh should have been tested for arsenic as well.

But the Court of Appeal struck out the claim by the Bangladeshis against the BGS, part of the British government’s Natural Environment Research Council, in February this year.

The NERC says that the claim for compensation was bound to fail if it was allowed to go to trial because the BGS owed them no duty of care.

Owen Gaffney, a press officer for BGS in Swindon, said: "There was no duty to test for arsenic as the research was carried out in connection with a small part of an agricultural irrigation project which had nothing to do with drinking water."

The case is still ongoing and the claimants are in the process of appealing to the House of Lords.