Summary: Lessons From A Disaster
We have told a number of stories in this book about environmental health hazards. To summarize the main messages, we will briefly tell another. There is one common pollutant, a product of human activity, that is responsible for many millions of deaths each year, most of them among small children. Human feces contaminating the water supply is the means by which cholera, dysentery, typhoid fever, and a number of parasitic diseases are spread. These diseases were killing people even in Western economically advanced countries throughout most of the nineteenth century, and are still among the most serious threats to the health of the majority of the people of the world. They can be prevented, as they are in the industrialized world, by rather simple measures, but measures that are beyond the economic resources of many of the less developed countries. Recently the United Nations has been providing funds and technological help in controlling them by improving access to uncontaminated drinking water. One such program in Bangladesh involved digging tube wells to get access to deep groundwater sources, so that the people would no longer have to drink surface water from ponds and streams contaminated by human and animal wastes. Bangladesh has had more than its share of misfortune. It is a low-lying country subject to floods and other natural disasters, which has not been spared disasters of human making as well. Originally part of Pakistan when British India was partitioned, it is cut off from the rest of Pakistan by a thousand miles of Indian territory. The people of Bangladesh, although Muslim in religion, were ethnically distinct and spoke a different language from the rest of Pakistan. Their attempts to gain greater autonomy for their region led to a brutal suppression by the Pakistan army in 1971, in which over 1 million people were killed. Indian military intervention led to the defeat of Pakistan and the creation of an independent country of about 150 million people, with the highest population density in the world and one of the lowest per capita incomes, under $300 a year.