Arsenic water killing people in Bangladesh

Hanufa Bibi stoops in a worn sari and mismatched flip-flops to work the hand pump on her backyard well. Spurts of clear water wash grains of rice from her hands, but she can never get them clean.

Thick black warts tattoo her palms and fingers, the result of drinking arsenic-laced well water for years. It’s a legacy that new research has linked to 1 in 5 deaths among those exposed inBangladesh – an impoverished country where up to half of its 150 million people have guzzled tainted groundwater.

The World Health Organization has called it “the largest mass poisoning of a population in history,” as countless new wells continue to be dug here daily without testing the water for toxins.

“The magnitude of the arsenic problem is 50 times worse thanChernobyl,” said Richard Wilson, president of the nonprofitArsenic Foundation and a physics professor emeritus at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. “But it doesn’t have 50 times the attention paid to it.”

The issue surfaced about two decades ago, after some 10 million shallow hand-pump wells like Bibi’s were sunk across the country in the 1970s with money from international donors.

The wells were meant to provide clean drinking water to help prevent deadly waterborne diseases, such as cholera. But they unintentionally tapped into arsenic deposits in the ground, releasing the odorless, colorless and tasteless toxin into water used for drinking and cooking. Arsenic has been linked to cancers, liver ailments, skin diseases, heart problems and other health issues.

The new research, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and published online June 19 inThe Lancet medical journal, is the first to examine how drinking arsenic-contaminated water over time shaves years off lives.

For the nearly 12,000 people followed over 10 years in the country’s Araihazar region east of the capital, researchers found that even low doses of arsenic in drinking water could increase the chances of early death. The study also found that damage on all levels appears to be permanent.

“It’s similar to tobacco smoking. Once you smoke for 20 years and then you stop smoking, your risk of getting tobacco-induced cancer over the next decade will still be high,” co-author Habibul Ahsan from the University of Chicago’s Center for Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention said by phone. “Even if, say, for some miracle all the individuals are provided arsenic-free water from tomorrow, these people will also be at a higher risk of dying for many years to come.”

More than 75 percent of those studied drank arsenic-contaminated water above WHO’s recommended safe limits. About a quarter of deaths from chronic illnesses and a fifth of the total 407 adult deaths were attributed to arsenic.