Toxic fallout of well-meant plans

Natural arsenic poisoning of the tube-wells dug in West Bengal and especially Bangladesh since the 1970s was first identified by scientists in the mid-1980s. But it did not become a public-health issue until 1995. At least 40 million Bengalis are affected, probably more than twice this number. The World Health Organisation has dubbed the disaster "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history". Nevertheless, it has hardly hit the headlines and is not much discussed outside the pages of the scientific press and those aid agencies and multilateral bodies, such as Unicef and the World Bank, involved in trying to provide arsenic-free water. Andrew Meharg's book is the first on the subject for the general reader, written by a biogeochemist who has been involved in the assessment of the problem.

Venomous Earth begins and ends with chapters on Bengal, but sandwiched in between, forming some two thirds of the book, is a history of arsenic. There is a potted account of alchemy; some discussion of how arsenic compounds were first chemically synthesised; a long section on the Victorian love affair with arsenic as an emerald-green colouring agent; stories about its use by poisoners and as a medicine; the history of how it was mined in Devon and Cornwall; and finally an account of how arsenic poisoning of water and soils has affected parts of North America, South America and other areas of the planet.

Most of this central material is interesting, in places fascinating, especially the extraordinary ambivalence with which Victorians treated arsenic. They used it in large quantities in the wallpapers of their houses, including their children's bedrooms. They wore it close to their skins in bonnets. They wrapped confectionery in pretty paper impregnated with arsenic. And they ingested arsenic in patent medicines, notably Dr Fowler's Liquor Arsenicalis, for the treatment of many ailments, including (from 1911 onwards) syphilis. At the same time, for decades the press vigorously campaigned against it. Even William Morris, with his Arts and Crafts wallpapers, was oblivious to the dangers. A former director of a hugely profitable copper and arsenic mine until he became a socialist, Morris could still write in 1885: "As to the arsenic scare, a greater folly it is hardly possible to imagine."

But it has to be said that the rich filling in this sandwich makes the bread seem comparatively unexciting. How does the history relate to the crisis in Bengal emphasised in the book's title? Venomous Earth does not seem to be sure what it is: a serious and substantial study of an urgent contemporary crisis, made palatable with stories from the field and the scientific front line, or a history of a crucial chemical element in which the current crisis is just the latest episode? By investigating our historic love-hate relationship with arsenic at such length, Meharg appears to want to explain what he calls the "staggering inertia" in today's global response to the mass poisoning of Bangladesh. But the juxtaposition, at least for this reader, is more distracting than illuminating.

Even so, as a former student of chemistry with a deep interest in Bengal, I am glad that Meharg has written an accessible book on a complex and intractable problem. His blending of science, history, culture, economics and development studies is clearly what is needed to arouse an indifferent Western public.

He is perceptive to single out a Bengali letter written by Rabindranath Tagore in 1893: "The people who say that a worldwide apportionment of the basic human necessities is mere fantasy, that the majority of men will always starve, that there is no alternative, say a terribly hard thing. And yet all these social problems are hard!"

Andrew Robinson, literary editor of The Times Higher , is the author of Earthshock and the co-author of a biography of Rabindranath Tagore.