GENERAL NEWS - Saturday 25 August 2001
 

OPINION / LEAD POISONING IN KLITY CREEK

Case closed, but the mystery remains

As far as the Public Health Ministry is concerned, lead poisoning did not cause the deaths of villagers in Klity Lang, a small village by the lead-contaminated Klity Creek in Kanchanaburi province. But government doctors have failed to say what caused the deaths. 
 
PLOENPOTE ATTHAKOR
                 
 The case is closed. A unanimous conclusion has been officially reached by doctors of the Public Health Ministry that the deaths of four Klity villagers in Kanchanaburi province was not caused by lead poisoning.

The doctors met earlier this month to explain away the mysterious deaths of the Klity villagers in the face of outcry from environmentalist groups.

Klity lead poisoning has been in the news for the past three years. In April 1998, the villagers protested that a lead extracting factory owned by an influential local politician had released untreated waste water into the creek for over 20 years, thus causing many deaths and illnesses in the village, which is located in a national forest.

Despite the severity of the problem, the state's efforts to remedy the problem have so far yielded little progress. The factory, after being fined 2,000 baht, has not been relocated. Although its operation has now ceased, that may only be temporary because the factory is awaiting a renewal of its licence. Meanwhile, the Pollution Control Department's plan to dredge the creek goes on at a snail's pace.

The Public Health Ministry, meanwhile, has primarily focused on the provision of safer drinking water for the villagers. Only a handful of children received medication for lead poisoning, and only for a short period of time. While the villagers complain that their health problems are not being attended to, doctors insist that the villagers' illnesses are not related to lead poisoning. Amid complaints from the Klity villagers and environmentalists, the ministry called the meeting of health experts to explain the situation from the doctors' points of view _ and hopefully to end the environmentalists' allegations regarding their inaction once and for all. A big portion of the meeting was devoted to posthumous diagnosis of the recent three out of four deaths in Klity. Making judgments based on written records alone,the doctors concluded they had died from other causes. The diagnoses, overwhelmed with medical jargon, gave theimpression the doctors' conclusion was a perfectly scientific, and impartial one. It was clear the doctors were hoping there should be no further doubts about the Klity death cases. But there still are. Sophisticated medical explanations have proved futile because of the inconsistent logic as well as the visible racial bias of health personnel who treat the Klity Karen as ``non-Thai'' folk. Let's examine the flawed logic first. It is ironic that although health experts admit that lead and exposure to lead is a serious problem for this ill-fated village, they keep insisting that the villagers can still live a normal life without medical intervention. Take the villagers' source of drinking water, for example. Since natural water in the Klity Creek is heavily contaminated with lead, the villagers must depend on drinking water piped in from nearby mountains. Still, it is found that lead content in the piped water is high, at 0.02 and 0.03 milligramme per litre. That exceeds the 0.01 mg/litre safety standard set by the World Health Organisation.

However, health experts argued that the lead content was still too small to cause health risks. They said the water would pose danger only when the villagers consumed 50 litres of water at a time. To convince that the water is ``safe'', one expert pointed out that drinking water in many other villages in Kanchanaburi and other provinces is of the same quality as in Klity and there seemed to be no health problems.

The fact that the Klity villagers are different because they already have a dangerously high lead content in their blood is simply dismissed.

Although the experts insisted the Klity villagers are perfectly safe, they contradicted themselves when _ in insisting that the provision of new water sources for the Klity peasants was not a worthwhile effort to serve just only one remote village _ they asserted that safe water alone would not help much because the Klity villagers were facing several other lead-poisoning risks.

``It is not just that the water is contaminated with lead. The toxic substance is found also in food, plants, dust and soil in the village,'' said Dr Thawisook Panpeng of the Health Department. ``Lead contamination in the soil at Klity is very high, making it especially dangerous to children who play and crawl on the ground. Therefore, it is not worth the cost to concentrate only on drinking water without eliminating other risk factors simultaneously.''

In fact, Dr Thawisook said there exists another safe option _ rainwater storage tanks _ and his office was ready to put them  in place if necessary. But that would cost more state money. After a brief discussion, the doctors reached the consensus that even rainwater storage was not necessary. Water with higher lead levels than international standards was still ``safe'' _ even for people whose daily lives are already under threat from over-exposure to the toxic substance. Tests showed lead levels in the Klity villagers' blood ranged from 12.56-48.40 microgrammes per decilitre, which is many times higher than that of an average Thai, which is recorded at 4.9 ug/dl.

Another hitch in the doctors' meeting was the lack of people's participation. Although the focus of discussion was the villagers' health, there was not even one villager present.

As it turned out, everything had been arranged by the Health Department, which set the agenda and recruited doctors and lead experts to comment on the Klity death cases. Why were the doctors so reluctant to declare that the Klity villagers' illnesses were lead-related? While the doctors' discussion on the panel was sophisticated, hard science talk to dismiss the link between lead poisoning and the villagers' illnesses, their informal conversation off the stage was more revealing.

One health official contemptuously referred to the Klity villagers as ``non-Thai'' forest encroachers who already have the luxury of receiving free health care services, all funded by taxpayers' money. ``These people are not Thai. And they have never paid taxes in their lives.'' For another expert, the Karen peasants at Klity are ignorant and stubborn for refusing to change their ways for a better life. That was close to saying that the health problems were all the villagers' fault: ``The state has already invested a lot of tax money in this village. We have provided safer drinking water and everything but they still continue to drink the creek water. For how much longer must the state look after these villagers? Things will not change if they do not try to adjust themselves and their behaviour.''

The Kanchanaburi Health Office insisted the provincial medical team never neglected the villagers. ``A total of 44 visits were made to the troubled village since October last year. Or an average of twice a month,'' an official said. Her statement was challenged by Surapong Kongchantuk, director of the Karen Development and Studies Centre. The provincial medical team, he said, did not provide medical treatment every time visited.``The medical authorities hardly paid serious attention to the villagers.''

Judging from the racist comments, one cannot but think racial bias is probably the real reason why the Klity problem has dragged on this long, with only cosmetic aid from the authorities.

While the medical bureaucracy dismisses lead as the cause of deaths and abnormalities in the local population, the experts have failed to answer one important question: What then is the real cause?

No answer has ever been provided. For the doctors, the case is closed. For the public, the mystery remains.