Arsenic in water spurs Asian ‘divorces’

CALCUTTA — Kalpana Mondal had a perfectly happy family life until the calluses started appearing on her skin three years after her marriage. Soon, sores lacerated her palms, and wartlike growths developed on her feet.

She began walking with a limp and most members in her husband’s large extended family in the village near Calcutta refused to accept food from her disfigured hands.

After examining her, doctors diagnosed Kalpana Mondal as a victim of arsenic poisoning and said it was caused by drinking contaminated water in her native village on the India-Bangladesh border since childhood.

Her husband and some of his relatives said the disease had left her “so ugly” that she could not live with the family anymore. Some neighbors believed she had leprosy, a disease that brings immediate isolation in Hindu society.

Soon, the 30-year-old woman was sent back to her parents with her year-old daughter, and her husband said she could only return to him if she were cured.

Four years after the separation from her husband, Kalpana’s physical condition has worsened, with festering patches developing on other parts of her body. Her hope of returning to her husband has been crushed, likely forever.

Now, as her illness takes away her ability to work, Kalpana lives like a beggar in the home of her widowed mother, depending on the charity of relatives and others.

“If my daughter were not with me, I would have committed suicide by now,” she said.

Subhash Dutta, an environmental activist in Calcutta said: “Hundreds of such ‘arsenic divorces’ have taken place in India and Bangladesh in the last decade. In some cases, the ostracized women committed suicide. In the arsenic-hit areas of both countries, there are thousands of young women who cannot be married because of the ‘ugly’ marks of arsenicosis they carry on their bodies.”

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 35 million to 77 million people drinking water from shallow tube wells in Bangladesh and India are exposed to high levels of arsenic in drinking water, and within a few years as many as 270,000 of them may die from cancer and other diseases caused by arsenic.

The issue is at the forefront of WHO’s campaigns for clean water.

[A tube well is made by drilling or pounding a tube into the ground to a stratum that bears water. A dug well is made by excavating with hand tools or power machinery. How the well is made does not affect the arsenic content of the water, but tube wells abound on the densely populated land near the Bay of Bengal, and one may provide water of high arsenic content while the water from another nearby is safer to drink.]

In 2000, Allan H. Smith, a WHO consultant and professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley, called the poisonings “a terrible public catastrophe.”

“Bangladesh is grappling with the largest mass poisoning of a population in history,” he said.

Dr. Smith said the scale of this environmental disaster is “beyond the accidents at Bhopal, India, in 1984, and Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986.” His research group calls it “the worst mass poisoning in human history.”

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