Britain has thrown out a lawsuit worth millions of pounds in compensation to victims of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh.
The rejection of the lawsuit has eliminated the last ray of hope for arsenic victims counting how many days they have left to live, according to Quazi Quamruzzaman, chairperson of the Dhaka Community hospital. ”We are frustrated at the outcome of the case,” he said.
The House of Lords, the Upper House of Britain’s Parliament, this week dismissed a case brought by Binod Sutradhar against the British Geological Survey. Sutradhar claimed the British Geological Survey was negligent in not testing for arsenic during a water evaluation in Bangladesh.
Sutradhar, from the Brahmanbaria district east of Dhaka, suffers from arsenic poisoning after he drank water from tube wells dug by international aid agencies in the 1990s.
In 1991, the British Geological Survey carried out a pilot research study into the chemistry of groundwater in central and north-east Bangladesh. At the time, there was no evidence that arsenic was present in water-soluble form, so the teams did not test for it.
But many feel that the British Geological Survey is responsible because although it saw that there was massive use of the tube-well water for drinking, it did not use the technology it had to determine whether this water was safe, says Shahdeen Malik, a member of Sutradhar’s legal counsel.
Mahmudur Rahman, coordinator of Dhaka Community Hospital Trust and member of the national arsenic expert committee, said the British Geological Survey team has knowledgeable people who cannot deny responsibility.
”Why did the British Geological Survey not determine water quality despite arsenic testing guidelines set by the World Health Organisation?” he said.
Millions of people continue to suffer from the use of drinking water that contains dangerously high levels of arsenic. It causes cancer of the skin, bladder, lungs and kidneys, killing 270 000 a year in Bangladesh.
The House of Lords upheld an earlier ruling by the United Kingdom Court of Appeal that the allegation, which could have cost British taxpayers millions of pounds, was ”hopeless”.
Sutradhar could not be reached for comment, but Malik told the online Science and Development Network website, SciDev.Net, that the House of Lords’ decision means that nobody is responsible for the sufferings of millions of people. ”This is really unfortunate,” he said.
The British Geological Survey argued that its report was a minor survey and that the local authorities responsible should have been aware that it did not determine whether the water was safe to drink.
Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the UK’s Environment Research Council, the parent organisation, said the ruling confirms that ”scientists cannot be held responsible for the research they decide not to do”.
Late last year, a report by Sonja van Renssen on SciDev.Net revealed that there was an ”infinite” supply of arsenic in Bangladeshi water.
Arsenic enters Bangladeshi drinking water from soil near the surface rather than deep underground as previously thought, say researchers. The finding suggests that there is an unlimited supply of the poison.
In a paper posted online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team says its results suggest the poison is released from sediments deposited by flooding.
”What this means is you have an essentially infinite source of arsenic that can be liberated up near the surface,” explained Matthew Polizzotto, one of the team at Stanford University, United States.
Arsenic poses a health risk to 57-million people in Bangladesh who drink well water laced with it at levels above those which the World Health Organisation says are safe. Exposure can cause cancers and disorders of the nervous system.
The chemical occurs naturally in the country’s soil and underlying sediments, but researchers have yet to understand exactly how it passes from the soil into the water.
Many thought that arsenic enters the water supply about 30m to 50m below the soil surface — which is also the depth from which wells pump underground water back up.
Previous research found that micro-organisms release the arsenic from underground minerals, which were thought to be deep underground. But the measurements of a team led by Scott Fendorf of Stanford University suggest that the minerals from which arsenic is released are not found at depths of 30m to 50m.
The team concluded that contamination primarily occurs within the top 5m of soil. From there, the contaminated water seeps down through the earth and rock before being brought back up as drinking water by the wells.
Charles Harvey, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, who also contributed to the study, said the findings highlight the need to conduct basic research into the water cycle in Bangladesh.
The problem, he told SciDev.Net, is that while there is now evidence that arsenic enters the water close to the soil surface, the ponds, rivers and rice fields that cover the surface in a watery ”mosaic” all have a different chemistry and deliver different amounts of water underground.
Unfortunately, said Harvey, neither development organisations nor researchers — the two groups looking at arsenic contamination in Bangladesh — have both the expertise and funding to do this.
Development organisations are busy searching for immediate solutions such as alternative clean water sources, while scientists only receive funding for original work — for example, sequencing the genome of the bacteria that liberates the arsenic.
”We can’t get funding to do the real basic hydrological work that will really help answer this question,” said Harvey. — SciDev.Net