Dr. Shasanko Sikor Roy attends to a patient who has diarrhea and stomach problems, most likely due to drinking brackish water. In the over 5 years that Dr Shasanko worked in the coastal area of Koyra in southwest Bangladesh, he observed an increase in the number of patients who complain of health issues related to increased salinity of the local water. He attributes these changes to climate change. In th coastal areas of Bangladesh, cyclones push saline water further and further inland. In addition, farmers have realized that shrimp farming can be more profitable than growing rice and they now flood increasingly large swaths of coastal land with sea water. Saline water poisons the fields and contaminates drinking water aquifers causing chronic diarrhea and preeclampsia during pregnancy. As if this wasn’t enough, Bangladesh has very high levels of naturally appearing arsenic in water. 20 million people, mostly in rural areas slowly poison themselves to death drinking water laced with arsenic here. Koyra area does not appear to have arsenic in the water according to local residents. July 14th, 2017.
Photo by Marcin Szczepanski/Sinking Cities Project
- Filename
- Bangladesh_0012.jpg
- Copyright
- Marcin Szczepanski
- Image Size
- 2000x1333 / 1.5MB
- www.marcinvisuals.com
