DHAKA, 1 October 2007 — Around 29 percent of Bangladesh’s 114 million people have been affected by arsenic contamination, chief engineer of the Department of Public Health and Engineering Mustafizur Rahman said in Dhaka yesterday. “All tube wells in 8,000 villages across the country are found to be 100 percent arsenic contaminated,” he told a press briefing also attended by Health Adviser retired Maj. Gen. Dr. A.S.M. Matiur Rahman.
In the 1970s, international agencies headed by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) began pumping millions of dollars of aid money into Bangladesh for tube wells to provide “clean” drinking water. According to the World Health Organization, it led to massive poisoning unparalleled in history. Up to half of Bangladesh’s tube wells, now estimated at around 10 million, became the source of poisoning.
Nobody tested for arsenic. And when a doctor found traces of the metalloid in patients who had developed tumors and signs of arsenic poisoning, efforts were made to hush up the matter.
Even now, as poisoning is being reported on a mass scale, nobody has owned responsibility. Not even UNICEF that initiated the tube wells program and paid for the first 900,000 wells.
The problem dates back to the early 1970s when most Bangladeshis living in rural areas depended on ponds and rivers for drinking water. Sewage bacteria, however, unleashed a battery of water-borne disease, which killed a quarter of a million children every year, according to the World Bank. So UNICEF launched a massive tube well project to tap into underground water resources, despite warnings by some local people that they were pumping the “devil’s water.”
UNICEF explains today, “At the time, standard procedures for testing the safety of groundwater did not include tests for arsenic metalloid, which had never before been found in the kind of geological formations that exist in Bangladesh.” But many geochemists, such as John McArthur at University College London, scoff at such a suggestion.
The Bangladesh government claims that cases of arsenic contamination came to its attention in 1993 and concluded two years later that the poisoning was widespread, with tube well water the likely cause. But according to Qazi Qamaruzzaman of the Dhaka Community Hospital, the government was told as early as 1985 that Bangladeshis crossing the border into West Bengal were being diagnosed with arsenic poisoning. Arsenic is a slow killer. The most obvious signs are the blisters found on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, which can eventually turn gangrenous and cancerous. At the same time, the poison also attacks internal organs, notably the lungs and kidneys, which can result in a range of illnesses including cancers. Despite the mounting evidence of contamination, there were no investigations.
The World Bank also maintains that “Before 1993, groundwater was never tested for arsenic,” according to Babar Kabir, hydrogeologist and head of the organization’s water department. But Peter Ravenscroft, an engineer based in Dhaka for the British engineering consultancy firm Mott MacDonald, who worked extensively for international aid agencies on the tube well program, says he first found arsenic in groundwater in the late 1980s and published his findings in 1990.
Yet it wasn’t until 1998 that the international community finally appeared to accept some responsibility for the mass poisoning of Bangladesh. The World Bank announced an emergency three-year program to identify the killer tube wells using simple tests and to “put in motion concrete actions to combat a major health crisis with devastating effects on the lives of millions.” With almost every one of the country’s 68,000 villages potentially at risk, the bank said it would initially survey 4,000 villages and draw up action plans for each. This “fast-track project” was to be the first phase in a 15-year program to screen the country’s tube wells.
But the “fast-track” program took another year to negotiate between the international agencies and the Bangladesh government, pushing its completion date to late 2002. And inquiries by the UNESCO have revealed that the program remains mired. Richard Wilson, a leading analyst of the crisis from Harvard University’s department of public health, says “The project is stalled.” He blames the Bangladesh government’s failure to “decide how to spend the money” and says that leading officers at the Bank are privately “most upset.”
