When the Bangladesh government asked its people to stop using arsenic-contaminated wells, they actually got sicker
GIVEN A CHOICE between using a nearby water well known to be contaminated with arsenic or a more distant one not known to be poisoned, every sane person would opt for the latter. In Bangladesh in the early 2000s, however, that appears to have been the wrong decision. In 1994 the government began a massive campaign to convince households drawing water from shallow backyard wells with high concentrations of arsenic to switch to deeper wells or streams that were free of the toxic metal.
In a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Nina Buchmann, an economist at Stanford, and her co-authors collected data from 3,138 Bangladeshi households between 2007 and 2009. Their data included a sample of more than 12,000 children born between 1980 and 2007, which allowed them to evaluate the mortality rate among households that did and did not switch water sources during the government’s campaign.
Since Bangladesh has one of the gravest arsenic-poisoning problems in the world, foreign public-health experts have generally praised the government’s efforts to curb the use of backyard wells. In just eight years, the group of governmental and non-governmental organisations spread awareness of contamination to the majority of the country’s households.
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