Abstract:

On Dec 3, 1984, an unprecedented chemical exposure, resulting from an explosion at a Union Carbide Corp pesticide factory, poisoned the residents of the city of Bhopal, the capital of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Medical researchers saw the Bhopal gas leak as a tragic disaster, but also as an opportunity to study the consequences of a devastating mass chemical exposure. Yet the exposure and the many questions it still raises remain. In the author's visits to government gas relief hospitals, doctors dismissed the idea of any persistent injury stemming from gas exposure. Practitioners had rewritten the failures of research -- both the limits on what has been done and the failure to apply it to treatment -- as proof of the harmlessness of the gas. In general, doctors had not read the extant medical research on the consequences of the gas. Nonetheless, they tended to believe that it disproves any chronic and ongoing effects of gas exposure.