In 2002 the United Nations Committee of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights issued a general comment recognizing the human right to water. More specifically, the right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible, and affordable water. However, the international legal regime has been unable to develop a way to enforce this right to water. The Bangladesh Water Act of 2013 ensures the development, management, exploration, distribution, use, protection, and conservation of water resources. Unfortunately, Bangladesh has had trouble enforcing this Act as anyone who has committed an offense under the Act is entitled to bail. The Act also does not clearly deal with salinity issues, even though that is the biggest issue when it comes to Bangladesh’s drinking water.

the for-profit company DrinkWell has been creating affordable filters for people in Bangladesh can use to clean their water. DrinkWell filters water by passing it through multiple tanks. They have established over thirty facilities in Bangladesh and India. Their goal is to reach five million people by 2020, with help through partnering with the government and NGOs.

For instance, Professor Abul Hassam from George Mason University invented a water filter that is affordable and does not acquire electricity. The national engineering academy awarded him one million dollars for his achievement. He plans to use the money to supply Bangladesh with water filters.

have been more focused on immediate environmental disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, neglecting the effects of slow violence.

She also acknowledged that if the issue had taken place in the United States there would have been bottled water delivered to everyone.

One reason for this is that wealthy nations show indifference to environmental crisis in poorer countries, as Rob Nixon points out.

The effects of arsenic poisoning take between ten to twenty years to set in,

Rob Nixon defines slow violence as “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.”

The Bush administration augmented this issue when they allowed for the dumping of industrial waste into nearby rivers or lakes in promotion of “big business”. Dr. Bilqis Hoque, director of environment and population research in Bangladesh, explains how because rivers are contaminated villagers are forced to drink arsenic contaminated groundwater.

Further, the loss of work hours and expenditures on treatment create even worsened economic conditions for the already poor patients.

These problems are multiplied when the poor are non-literate and from countries lacking experience in environmental law. In the case of Bangladeshi sufferers, these factors apply to nearly all victims.

The majority of Arsenicosis patients, seventy-one percent, belong to low-income groups, while all the remaining patients are middle class. Of these patients, eighty-two percent have lower levels of education and ninety-one percent are suffering from malnutrition.

Arsenic contamination disproportionately affects the poor because the people that are malnourished are at the highest risk of negative health effects from consuming arsenic infected water.

For instance, one teenage girl reported to Farhana Sultana that “My father said we’ll have to drink this water [from the red tubewell] and that we shouldn’t go to the bazaar to get water from the green tubewell. It is not allowed”.

While women are typically responsible for water collection and understand the detriments of drinking poisoned water, they lack decision making regarding water safety for their households.

In the work world, employers are reluctant to hire arsenic-affected individuals because of misconceptions about the disease.

One example of this is Pinjira Begum, a twenty-five-year-old mother of three. Pinjira’s husband took a second wife because according to him, “She was pretty once, but now she is too thin and smells bad and is uglier by the day”. Pinjira, who was already extremely sick, now must sleep a few feet away from her husband and his new bride.

Arsenic-affected individuals are often ostracized by their communities, as the condition is frequently mistakenly perceived as contagious. Because of this, they experience social exclusion, where they are barred from community activities and at times are rejected by family members.

The most basic treatment patients receive is cessation of arsenic contaminated water. There are no well-designed studies to show if cutting off exposure to arsenic heals skins lesions and decreases cancer likelihood, although it is certainly better than the alternative. Another form of treatment is chelation therapy, where chemicals that bind strongly with arsenic are provided to patients and are then excreted out in urine. This process can remove substantial groups of arsenic in hours. However, it is found that arsenic is already excreted out rapidly, so it is unclear if chelation therapy makes that much of a difference.

Other long term side effects include diabetes, pulmonary and cardiovascular disease, and developmental effects.

Short term side effects of significant arsenic consumption include diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pain, as well as numbness and tingling of extremities and muscle cramping.

During a BBC News interview, Minhaj Chowdhury discusses how he has witnessed skin lesions, mottled teeth and gangrene all over people when he visited a village in Bangladesh. In the same documentary, Siaton Nessa Meherpur, an arsenic victim, explains how she has heart problems and joint pain because the arsenic has deteriorated her body. She is unable to do any work or cooking and must be taken care of by her family.

Fazlur’s body is riddled with tumors and his foot has been amputated. He explains how the pain he experiences makes him not want to live anymore, but he goes on because of his two children.

Arsenic may affect DNA methylation and repair mechanisms, enhancing UV-induced skin cancers. Smokers exposed to arsenic in drinking water have elevated risk of bladder cancer, even though the latency period may exceed forty years. Similarly, arsenic works synergistically with cigarette smoke, greatly increasing the risk of lung cancer.

Likewise, an estimated 43,000 deaths annually in Bangladesh are attributed to arsenic poisoning.

The issue is so widespread that an estimated fifty-seven million people in Bangladesh, about half of their population, are at risk of cancer because of contaminated well water.

Dr. Allan Smith, a world leading arsenic expert from the University of California, describes the crisis as “The largest mass chemical poisoning of a population”. When asked to compare it to the infamous chemical crisis of Bhopal and Chernobyl, Smith argues that they “pale into insignificance”, as those catastrophes dealt with thousands of deaths while the crisis in Bangladesh is dealing with hundreds of thousands.

Supported by international agencies, Bangladesh’s government installed around four million tubewells to access better quality groundwater. As a result, by 1996 the mortality rates halved for both infants and children under five.

Infant mortality was 151/1000 and under-five mortality was 247/1000.