Water damage: Bangladesh's battle against arsenic blight

John Vidal, environment editor with the UK's Guardian newspaper, recently went to Bangladesh to run a CPU training course designed to help journalists write about the environment. One of the country's most pressing problems is arsenic-contaminated drinking water. He and Shahid Chowdhury, a journalist with the New Age newspaper, report on the World Health organisation says is one of the world's biggest but least known public crises.

We find Salmar, a 37-year-old mother of three from the Munshiganj district in Bangladesh, sitting on her bed in Dhaka's main hospital. She has sores on her hands and leg, one eye is damaged and she has a tumour in her head.

"Doctors diagnosed nine years ago that the root of my health complications is arsenic poisoning through drinking water. No one in the villages had any idea about arsenic contamination in tube well water at that time", she says.

Salmar is just one of nearly 85 million people believed to have been drinking high levels of arsenic-contaminated water for many years in Bangladesh. The World Health Organisation has called this public health crisis "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history", going far beyond accidents in Bhopal, India, in 1984, and Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986.

Public health experts predict that by 2055, there will be 2.5 million cases of arsenic poisoning, including tumours, skin complaints, swollen limbs, ulcers and internal complications. Skin cancers typically occur 20 years after people start ingesting the poison. In Bangladesh's case, the majority of wells were sunk in the 1980s.

The problem is now widespread across Bangladesh, large parts of India, Cambodia, Nepal, Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia. It began after well-meaning western charities and the UN recommended countries sink millions of shallow tube wells to avoid drinking polluted river or surface water. What they did not know was traces of arsenic occur naturally in sedimentary rocks at the very depth which most of the wells were sunk.

Dr. Qazi Quamruzzaman, chairman of the Dhaka community hospital that has so far treated about 14,000 arsenicosis patients and runs 30 treatment centres around Bangladesh, said the concentration of arsenic in the soil is steadily increasing. "It will continue to increase in coming years until alternative arrangements are made."

A recent UN World Food organisation study, done with Cornell University in the US, showed high concentrations of arsenic in soil and irrigation water often lead to high levels of arsenic in crops and are posing an increased food safety risk. "The arsenic-polluted water is also causing food chain contamination which will definitely cause health problems", said Quamruzzaman.

"Four billion dollars have already been spent for arsenic mitigation projects in the country although subsequent governments have failed to understand the level of arsenic contamination and the magnitude of the problem," he said.

The UN says about five million tube wells have been tested in Bangladesh and so far 1.5 million were found to contain arsenic above the safe limit of 50 parts per billion. Up to 70 per cent of the wells - 100 per cent in some of the villages - are affected.

In the villages - where wells are marked red if contaminated, green if not - a massive plan is underway to construct filtration systems. In Sirajdikhan, a district 50 km from Dhaka where 47 per cent of the 18,631 tube wells have been found to be contaminated and 286 people have been found to be suffering, villagers are returning to using treated surface water.

But this time the drinking water is either filtered through sand, or rainwater is collected in concrete tanks. Elsewhere, new wells are being sunk up to 600 feet deep into rock strata where no arsenic can be detected.

"It will take years to eradicate. It is a never ending process", says Babul Mia, head of the local government.