Research indicates that climate breakdown will increase the risk of cancer for tens of millions of people in Bangladesh due to contaminated well water. The rising sea levels, unpredictable flooding, and extreme weather associated with climate change are expected to expedite the release of hazardous levels of arsenic into the country's drinking water, warn scientists.
This will further exacerbate an existing public health crisis in Bangladesh, where millions already suffer from skin, bladder, and lung cancers due to arsenic poisoning.
“Chronic arsenic poisoning from drinking water … is a real problem, not a theoretical exercise,” said the lead researcher, Dr Seth Frisbie, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Norwich University, in a recent presentation of the findings. “I once walked into a village where no one was over 30 years old.”
The crisis of arsenic water contamination traces its roots back to the 1970s when Bangladesh faced one of the world's highest rates of infant mortality caused by polluted surface water. In response,
UN aid agencies and NGOs initiated an extensive program involving deep tube wells to offer clean water for domestic use, crop irrigation, and fish farming. Although these new wells effectively lowered child mortality rates by minimising waterborne diseases, it was evident by the 1990s that water sourced from sedimentary rocks beneath Bangladesh contained elevated levels of naturally occurring arsenic.
The first case of chronic arsenic poisoning from drinking well water was diagnosed in Bangladesh in 1993 and the World Health Organization would go on to describe it as the “largest mass poisoning of a population in history”.