Poisoned waters: Bangladesh, desperately seeking solutions.

• Author: Kinley, David H., III

Bangladesh has both too much water and not enough of it. On the one hand, this poor and densely packed nation--130 million people in an area the size of New York state--is laced with the great Ganges and Jamuna rivers and countless lesser streams. Rainfall totals about 80 inches a year. The country is largely flat, and immense tracts of floodplain become lakes during the monsoon season. Water is nothing if not abundant.

Finding water that is safe to drink is another story, however. It has long been a constant challenge for millions, especially the isolated rural poor. Now, drinking water is the villain in what CBS television once called "the greatest poisoning in human history."

In Nilkanda village, in the Sonargaon subdistrict about two hours from the capital, Dhaka, housewife Monwara Begum tells how her tragedy began to unfold. "Hand pumps helped us to avoid the diseases in the pond," she says, referring to the contamination of surface waters by human and animal waste. "But after drinking from the hand pump over many years, my husband fell ill with arsenic poisoning. We use a filter system now for all we drink, but I'm not convinced it is safe."

"More than 60 percent of the wells in this subdistrict are contaminated with arsenic and unsafe to drink from," explains Sayed Ershad, a development worker who has spent the last several years grappling with the disaster. "Many people still drink the poison water from the wells. The alternatives cost them time and money, and people here face extreme poverty."

Across the village, a thin and listless middle-aged man sits quietly in his ramshackle bamboo and thatch home. His skin is discolored and his hands and feet are pocked with callous-like growths, telltale signs of arsenicosis. "He continues to drink from the contaminated well," says Ershad. "He doesn't use a filter because he's convinced he doesn't have many more days to live."

The Best of Intentions

Bangladesh's high population density and lack of sanitation infrastructure keeps surface waters perpetually contaminated, and waterborne diarrheal diseases have long been a leading cause of widespread illness and premature infant death. In response, the government began installing shallow tubewells (sealed pipes extending down into the groundwater and equipped with simple hand pumps) when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan. Following the independence struggle and subsequent famine in 1971, international aid agencies (UNICEF, the World Bank, the UN Development Programme) and private interests joined the effort. Since then several million tubewells have been sunk into the shallow water table, and hand pumps have become an icon of a better life for the rural poor. World Health Organization (WHO) reports suggest that the tubewells helped slash infant and child mortality by half over the last 40 years.

The discovery of high concentrations of naturally occuning arsenic in the groundwater is thus a bitter irony. Heavy-metal contamination was not even considered in Bangladesh until evidence of arsenicosis began to emerge in the neighboring Indian state of West Bengal in the late 1980s. Arsenic-contaminated wells were first confirmed in Bangladesh in 1993 and it wasn't until...