Who did this? Nature? Evil corporations?
Why no, as a matter of fact, it was the professional compassionate class (tip to the Corner):
What caused the largest mass poisoning of a population in history? After all, the people of East Bengal have not always suffered from arsenic poisoning. Professor Graziano is reported as having remarked:
You can't just make this a natural history of arsenic poisoning.
No, indeed not - for, as we are told, relatively sotto voce as it were:
The sad irony is that the problem is the unintended consequence of a campaign in the 1970s and 1980s by international development organisations, including UNICEF, to get villagers to stop drinking dirty surface water.It was they who advised and paid for the wells that seem to have poisoned up to half the population of the country.
"Caring" is highly over-rated as an admirable quality when it exists in isolation from common sense and actual science. In this case it paved a path to mass sickness.
