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SELINUS, O., ALLOWAY, B., CENTENO, J. A., FINKELMAN, R. B., FUGE, R., LINDH, U. & SMEDLEY, P. (eds) 2005. Essentials of Medical Geology. Impacts of the Natural Environment on Public Health.

xiv +812 pp. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Price £59.99 (hard covers). ISBN 0 12 636341 2.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

With fears of pandemic diseases at a time when general public health is at an all-time high in the developed world, it is easy to overlook the influence of the surrounding, inorganic environment on peoples’ health. Were you to live on the lower floodplains of the Ganges or Brahmaputra rivers, in West Bengal or Bangladesh, that influence would be all too apparent. In the interest of reducing endemic poor heath resulting from waterborne pathogens, there has been a huge programme of well-sinking to tap abundant, biologically clean groundwater since the 1970s. By the mid-1980s it had become clear that a completely unexpected case of ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’ had emerged. Villagers began to present the classic symptoms of chronic arsenic poisoning: horny lesions on hands and feet (keratoses) and dark spots on the rest of the body (now termed ‘the Devil’s rain’ by many Bangladeshis). A combination of the geological evolution of the river sediments and simple geochemical reactions had led to what the World Health Organization claimed to be the greatest . . . [Full Text of this Article]