From the New York Times, November 10, 1998, excerpts:
DEATH BY ARSENIC: A special report.; New Bangladesh Disaster: Wells That Pump Poison
By BARRY BEARAK
This fall, the young mother found out that her own slow dying was nothing unusual, that tens of thousands of Bangladeshi villagers were suffering the same ghastly decay, with their skin spotted like spoiled fruit and warts and sores covering their hands and feet.
Bangladesh is in the midst of what some experts say could be the biggest mass poisoning in history. Dangerous levels of arsenic have been found in the ground water, entering millions of people sip by sip as they drink from a vast system of tube wells. Most of these hand-operated pumps are 10 to 20 years old, about the same period it takes the arsenic to do its lethal work, killing with one of several cancers....
Doctors and aid workers told Pinjira Begum, 25, of this calamity as they explained to her how seriously ill she was. But news that her misery had a huge amount of company was no consolation to a mother of three with her 4-month-old daughter, Juthi, in her arms. Too many other indignities were rushing into her life.
Her husband had decided that she was no longer of use to him. ''She was pretty once, but now she is too thin and smells bad and is uglier by the day,'' he said.
On Oct. 21, using a man's traditional right in these Islamic hinterlands, Masud Rahman, 25, took a second wife. Now, as Pinjira's fevered body seems to melt in the bed, her husband sleeps a few feet away with a new bride....
Babar N. Kabir, a World Bank hydrologist who is assessing the problem, believes that he is being conservative when he estimates that 18 million people are now poisoning themselves.... |
