If the victims were not impoverished, disempowered Indians, the Bhopal disaster would probably be on the lips of every human being alive to this day.
People who were in utero during the Bhopal disaster "report decades later to have higher rates of cancer, higher rates of disability precluding employment, and lower levels of education."
On the night of December 2nd to 3rd, 1984, a pesticide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal began leaking a toxic chemical called methyl isocyanate. People sleeping miles away recall suddenly waking up because they felt like they were choking. Chemicals burned their eyes and mouths. Survivors tell stories of the streets being strewn with corpses. Men, women and children collapsed to the ground while foaming at the mouth, feces streaming down their legs as they lost control of their bowels.
By the time the immediate crisis had passed three days later, between 7,000 and 10,000 people had already died. The final official death toll is approximately 22,000 — more people than perished during the infamous Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. The plant was owned by the U.S.-based chemical corporation Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), and with all of their wealth and power, the company largely avoided accountability, although in 2010 seven Indian former employees were convicted of negligence.
To this day, hundreds of thousands of people in Central India continue to suffer from severe medical conditions as a result of the accident. Children are born with fingers growing out of their shoulders and missing palates from their mouths. People of all ages languish from ailments of the eyes, lungs and blood. And it appears that the methyl isocyanate didn't simply cover a large chunk of Central India — it has continued to linger in the environment.
That is where Dr. Gordon C. McCord and other researchers at the University of California San Diego — including Prashant Bharadwaj, Lotus McDougal, Arushi Kaushik and Anita Raj — enter the picture. McCord is the corresponding author of a new study published in the medical journal BMJ Open, one that analyzed data about thousands of Indians — both those exposed to the Bhopal accident and those who were not — to learn about patterns in their overall health and education. By doing so, the researchers hoped to estimate the relative effect of being in utero near Bhopal during the catastrophe.
"While there have been many studies of the disaster's effects on people living in Bhopal at the time, there has been far less work on the effects on the next generation, or on long-term socioeconomic effects beyond health," McCord told Salon by email. "To our knowledge, the use of spatial methods with recently gathered survey data to study these long term impacts is novel."
Their conclusion was sobering: People who were in utero during the Bhopal disaster were decades later more likely to report "higher rates of cancer, higher rates of disability precluding employment, and lower levels of education. Our work also suggests that the effects of the disaster reaches people living up to 100 km (more than 62 miles) away, a wider geographic range of impact than previously acknowledged."
"The methyl isocyanate gas affected respiratory, neurological, musculoskeletal, ophthalmic, endocrine and reproductive systems, and it damaged human chromosomes."
Poignantly, the authors noted that the long-term health consequences could have been caused not only by the leak itself, but also by residents' lack of access to quality social services.
"The long-term consequences that we estimate could be the result of both direct effects from exposure as well as lack of subsequent mitigation of the effects through health, disability and education services," they write. Indeed, the response to the Bhopal gas disaster is so inadequate compared to ongoing human needs that, to this day, scientists cannot ascertain with certainty everything that happened to the bodies of the Central Indians who were impacted by the incident.
"We cannot confirm the reasons in this paper, but there is evidence the methyl isocyanate gas affected respiratory, neurological, musculoskeletal, ophthalmic, endocrine and reproductive systems, and it damaged human chromosomes," McCord explained. "Miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal mortality increased following the disaster. All of this makes it quite plausible that the toxic effects of the gas affected children in utero."
Although the paper did not focus on advocating for specific policies, there are certain self-evident conclusions that are immediately apparent, at least if the goal is to prevent future humanitarian horrors like the Bhopal disaster.
"This disaster put into stark focus the tradeoff that developing countries face in regulating dangerous industries," McCord explained. "On the one hand, industrial growth creates jobs and economic development, and on the other it introduces risks that industry and government need to manage through regulation."
In addition to fairly compensating all of the victims, McCord argued that "more broadly, these long-run inter-generational impacts should inform how policymakers evaluate the appropriate level of regulation and oversight that should be put in place to promote economic growth while minimizing risks to workers and society at large."
As the authors of the study concluded, "these results indicate social costs stemming from the [Bhopal gas disaster] that extend far beyond the mortality and morbidity experienced in the immediate aftermath."
Policymakers need to quantify the health impact not only on immediate survivors, but on future generations. "Moreover, our results suggest that the [Bhopal gas disaster] affected people across a substantially more widespread area than has previously been demonstrated."
