An unprecedented crisis of drinking water contaminated by natural arsenic affects nearly 100 million people in West Bengal and Bangladesh. Experts dealing with the toxicity of arsenic now have a potentially even bigger problem: recent research shows that arsenic-polluted water is tastier than normal water, and is addictive. "It's a shame that we have taken so long to discover the addictive nature of arsenic," says environmental scientist Dipankar Chakraborty.
Groundwater in the affected districts of West Bengal and Bangladesh have 30 times more arsenic content than what is regarded safe. The problem is alarmingly worse in Bangladesh, where some 70 million people —more than half the country's population—are at risk from arsenic-contaminated water.
The addictive nature of arsenic makes it even more difficult to find a solution to this huge crisis. Says Chakraborty, "Upto four million people sick with chronic arsenic poisoning have got so used to drinking arsenic ground water that they have acquired a taste for the water of death."
Arsenic is a slow, versatile and gruesome killer, attacking living tissues and in many cases damaging blood vessels. People get skin disorders and cancerous tumours leading to almost inevitable death. The milder disorders it triggers include conjunctivitis, nausea, diarrhoea and fatigue. Affected people are easily recognisable: inflamed eyes, skin lesions, gangrene and skin growths. As arsenic takes over the body, nails rot and horrific skin conditions develop.