From Bangladesh comes a story of criminal irresponsibility on the part of UNICEF, the United Nations Agency for whom I used to collect pennies, nickels and dimes as a child on Halloween in the 1950s. In an ill-considered move to "help" Bangladeshis stop drinking dirty surface water, the agency financed the construction of wells to provide "clean" drinking water.But as this article by Fred Pearce published by UNESCO (a UN agency itself) states:Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands will die.Why? Because nobody tested for the natural poison, arsenic, widely found in underground water. And when a doctor did find traces of the metal, and when Bangladeshi villagers did start turning up at doctors' surgeries with the tumours and telltale signs of arsenic poisoning, the results were swiftly buried so that nobody made the connection.Even now as the scale of the calamity emerges, nobody is admitting culpability. Not UNICEF, which initiated the tubewells programme and paid for...(Read Full Post)