WHO Expects 270,000 Deaths from Poisoned Water

Millions poisoned by wells dug to save lives

SHAIKH AZIZUR RAHMAN IN CALCUTTA MORE than 270,000 will die in the world’s worst mass poisoning after up to 77 million people in Bangladesh and India were exposed to drinking water contaminated with high levels of arsenic, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation. 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....

This is from a newspaper site in Scotland. Jesus. The U.S. could easily send massive help to these victims, but first let's give one more tax cut to the rich, no?