Professor Keith Richards (Department of Geography. University of Cambridge
Creating and managing "the largest poisoning of a people in history"
The problem of arsenic contamination in shallow groundwater in Bangladesh and West Bengal has been referred to as "the largest poisoning of a people in history", with 50-60 million people drinking water with >10ppb of arsenic (the WHO safe limit). This is because of a deliberate policy to promote cheap shallow tubewells in order to avoid the high risk of enteric disease as a result of using polluted surface water; a relative risk problem in the face of ignorance. Enteric diseases have declined, but skin lesions, cancers, and other diseases are increasing and will continue to do so because of their latency. National and international response has been tardy, perhaps because the problem has become overwhelming and remedial/corrective policies are not obviously feasible. This seems a paradigmatic case of the risk society in which "the hazards which are now decided and consequently produced by society undermine the established safety systems of the provident state's existing risk calculations" (Beck, 1996), except that it is arguably not realised in societies in reflexive modernity. Although a hard case, it challenges many aspects of risk governance: risk under ignorance (could this not have been foreseen?); risk and precaution (would this have helped?); relative risk and uncertainty (about corrective action, future policies, future health issues).
