Richard Wilson, a physics professor at Harvard University and head of the Arsenic Foundation, said Bangladeshi village committees need to work with aid agencies to plan and build new water systems, hire managers and ensure that drinking water is permanently monitored.

Wilson was among a group of North American chemists, public health experts, medical researchers, physicists, engineers and geologists who gathered in this west Canadian city on Monday to discuss what they say is Bangladesh's arsenic crisis.

The World Health Organization has called it the "largest mass poisoning of a population in history".

While the arsenic occurs naturally worldwide, it has become a public health crisis in the South Asian country of 144 million people because of good intentions gone awry.

To curb disease from dirty surface water, development agencies in the 1970s dug "tube wells" throughout Bangladesh to provide clean-looking water from underground aquifers.

Only in the late 1980s did a local health researcher link the wells to an outbreak of strange skin lesions, one symptom of arsenic poisoning.

Since then as many as 30 percent of the wells have been tested, said Wilson, but more than 50 million people are still exposed to water with higher arsenic levels than the World Health Organization considers safe.

As many as 250,000 and one million deaths are predicted, from cancer or other arsenic-related maladies, including respiratory illness and infection.

"I'm worried about the future generations," said Hasamat Alanvir, a Bangladeshi national at Canada's University of British Columbia who is working on a doctorate in health care and epidemiology.

"Half of the population is drinking arsenic-contaminated water, and has a chance of developing cancer."

Alanvir said a student association organized the conference to raise awareness of the crisis, inviting speakers from universities in Canada, and the US states of Massachusetts, California and Washington.

"We couldn't afford to pay the airfare, but asked them to please come and talk. They came, at their own expense," said Alanvir.

What the experts agreed on is that there are no simple solutions.

The experts said it is also not clear why arsenic poisoning has become so widespread in Bangladesh. Other geographic areas have more naturally-occurring arsenic in the ground, without the water contamination.

Some scientists hypothesize that Bangladesh's problem is caused by local water chemistry. Others suggest it is because of the way vegetation decomposes in the monsoon cycles of wet and dry periods, which affect levels of oxygen in ground water.

And local factors enhance the impact of the poison, including a poor diet and addiction to chewing intoxicating betel palm seeds.

"We now know that chewing betel-nuts doubles the risk of problems from arsenic," said Wilson.

Prevention is the only solution, because there is no satisfactory treatment to arsenic poisoning, say experts.

"In every other part of the world the solution has been simple: you stop people from drinking the arsenic water," said Wilson.

But in Bangladesh, the low level of education, poverty and government corruption are barriers, he said, predicting that only grassroots campaigns funded by vital aid money will work.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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