Vol. 73/No. 34      September 7, 2009

The World Health Organization says 1.6 million people—90 percent of them children under five—die yearly from diarrheal diseases, including cholera. Hundreds of millions suffer from diseases ranging from intestinal infections to blindness due to lack of access to safe drinking water and the unsanitary conditions in which billions of working people are forced to live.

In Bangladesh alone, tens of millions are at risk of arsenic-poisoning related diseases from contaminated wells. According to the World Health Organization up to 270,000 people in Bangladesh could die of cancer related to drinking contaminated water. The real figures, however, are hard to estimate since some illnesses might not show up for 8 to 20 years.

The Bangladeshi government, along with UNICEF, the World Bank, and the British Geological Survey (BGS), promoted the construction of millions of tube wells in the country but never suggested testing for arsenic in the water.

The wells in Bangladesh were dug starting in the 1970s, as part of an initiative to provide “safe” drinking water as an alternative to bacteriologically contaminated surface water responsible for some 250,000 deaths each year, according to the World Bank.

“We saved millions from dying of diarrhea,” said Carel de Rooy, UNICEF’s representative in Bangladesh, as she defended the measure. This “compassionate” measure has been justified by some saying that more is known now about the toxicity of arsenic in water than before, even though there are well-documented cases of contaminated river water in 1971 in Antofagasta, Chile, and of wells in West Bengal, India, in 1988.

In 2004 a British court ruled in favor of BGS in a lawsuit brought by two Bangladeshi residents who accused the organization of neglecting to detect the arsenic. BGS had been called in to survey the water. The survey team ran tests for other chemicals, but not arsenic.

In 2000, there were 60 million people in Bangladesh drinking water with arsenic levels higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standard, according to Richard Wilson, a Harvard professor, in a report presented at the Royal Geographic Society in 2007.

At the beginning of the 1990s, a campaign was launched to identify contaminated wells. Almost 20 years later, of the 8.6 million existing wells only 55 percent have been inspected, according to Spain’s daily El País.

The disregard by the ruling capitalist families for water safety is not limited to underdeveloped countries. For more than two decades, authorities in the working-class community of Crestwood, near Chicago, secretly drew water from a contaminated well in order to reduce costs, according to a Chicago Tribune feature in April.

In 1986, the Tribune said, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency informed Crestwood officials that they had found dangerous dry-cleaning solvents, including vinyl chloride, in a well used by the town. There are no safe levels of exposure to the chemical, the EPA says.

To avoid scrutiny, Crestwood’s officials told the state that they would get all their tap water from Lake Michigan, but instead continued drawing from the well. It was not until December 2007 after state officials tested the water for the first time in more than 20 years, that they found that town authorities were still piping water from the contaminated well. The test was prompted by an investigation by a resident whose son developed leukemia as a toddler.

Public water supplies in 42 states are contaminated with 141 unregulated chemicals for which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has never established safety standards, according to the Washington-based Environmental Working Group.
 
 
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