Poisonous IPS news reports appear daily in English, German, Finnish, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish. Villagers are staying away from tube wells in some villages in the north and west where they have gone back to drinking unclean pond water because of fear of arsenic poisoning. The contamination of ground water with arsenic has turned into the most serious of Bangladesh's health problems, affecting some 65 million people across 52 of the country's 64 districts. Health authorities were slow to react to the disaster, even though the first case of contamination was detected in 1993. Only over the last six months has the process of identifying contaminated tubewells started.
Progress is slow.
Poisoned tubewells have been painted red to warn off villagers. WHO recommended level in two- thirds of some 8,000 tubewells it examined. Another random study by the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health detected 5,664 new cases of people with skin mutilating lesions, the classic symptom of arsenic poisoning which takes between eight and 14 years to show up on the body. Bangladesh recently hosted an international conference on arsenic pollution which concluded that the supply of arsenic free water was the only solution to this very serious problem in Bangladesh. A high-powered national committee headed by the health minister was set up last year to monitor the arsenic problem and suggest appropriate measures to contain the hazard.