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ARTICLE 1: China Scientists Show How Arsenic Treats Blood

Cancer
Fri, Apr 9 2010
By Tan Ee Lyn

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Scientists in
China have demonstrated how arsenic
a favorite murder weapon in the
Middle Ages -- destroys deadly blood
cancer by targeting and killing specific
proteins that keep the cancer alive.

"Our study showed how arsenic
directly targets these proteins and kills
them," lead researcher Zhang Xiaowei
at the State Key Laboratory of Medical Genomics in Shanghai, China, told
Reuters.

"Unlike chemotherapy, the side effects of arsenic (in treating acute promyelocytic
leukemia) are very low. There is no hair loss or suppression of bone marrow
(function). We are interested in finding out how arsenic can be used in other
cancers," Zhang said by telephone.










Well known for its toxicity, arsenic was regarded in the past as the king among
poisons because its symptoms are like those of cholera and can often go
undetected.

In China, however, it has long served a dual purpose. Apart from intentional
poisoning, it has been used for at least 2,000 years in traditional Chinese
medicine.

In 1992, a group of Chinese doctors reported how they used arsenic to treat
acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), a blood and bone marrow cancer that has
surprisingly high cure rates of over 90 percent in China.

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However, the actual workings of arsenic and how it interacts with cancer tissues
has never been clear -- until Zhang and his colleagues used modern technology
to find out.

In a paper published in the journal Science, Zhang and his team,
which includes Health Minister Chen Zhu, described
how they used modern equipment and saw
how arsenic attacked specific proteins that
would otherwise be keeping the cancer
alive and well.

"This shows how Western technology
can be used to find out about the
mysteries of Chinese medicine,"
Zhang said.

"Although many countries are now
using arsenic to treat APL, some
countries are resistant to the idea. It
depends a lot on whether doctors recommend
it and whether patients accept it."

In APL, there is a drop in the production of normal red blood cells and platelets,
resulting in anemia and thrombocytopenia. The bone marrow is unable to
produce healthy red blood cells. Until the 1970s, APL was 100 percent fatal and
there was no effective treatment.

"The clinical result of arsenic in treating APL is well-established. More than 90
percent of APL patients in China have (at least) five years of disease-free
survival," Zhang said.

In a separate commentary in Science, Scott Kogan at the University of California
San Francisco Cancer Center wrote that proper case selection and combination
therapy with arsenic may lead to improved outcomes for treating not only
promyelocytic leukemia, but other diseases as well.

"If so, an ancient medicine, revived through careful clinical and biological studies
in modern times, will have an even greater impact on human health," wrote
Kogan, who was not linked to the Chinese study.


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ARTICLE 2: How the West poisoned Bangladesh
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Up to 20 million people in Bangladesh are at risk of
suffering early deaths because of arsenic poisoning the
legacy of a well-intentioned but ill-planned water project
that created a devastating public health catastrophe.

Four decades after an internationally funded move to dig
tube wells across the country massively backfired, huge
numbers of people still remain at higher risk of
contracting cancer and heart disease. The intellectual
development of untold numbers of children is also being
held back by the contamination of drinking water. Poor
diet exacerbates the risk.

Bangladesh's arsenic crisis dates back to the 1970s when,
in an effort to improve the quality of drinking water and counter diarrhoea, which was
one of the country's biggest killers of children, there was large-scale international
investment in building tube wells. It was believed the wells would provide safe supplies
for families, otherwise dependent on dirty surface water which was killing up to 250,000
children a year.

Yet the move, spearheaded by the UN and the World Bank, was fatally flawed. Although
checks were carried out for certain contaminants in the newly sourced water, it was not
tested for arsenic, which occurs naturally in the Ganges and
Brahmaputra deltas. By the early 1990s, when it was
found that up to half of 10 million tube wells were
contaminated with arsenic, Bangladesh was
confronting a huge problem. The World Health
Organization called it "the largest mass poisoning
of a population in history... The scale of the
environmental disaster is greater than any seen
before; it is beyond the accidents in Bhopal,
India, in 1984, and Chernobyl, Ukraine, in
1986".

Some subsequent studies predicted that, ultimately,
one person in 10 who drinks water from the arsenical
wells would go on to die from lung, bladder or skin
cancer. Even though some of these conditions take
decades to develop, by 2004, about 3,000 people a year
were dying from arsenic-related cancers.

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Since the 1990s, organizations such as UNICEF have
led the effort to develop and provide alternative
sources of water, such as collecting rainwater and
filtering surface water. Slowly, the percentage of
families exposed to contaminated water has fallen.
But a survey conducted by UNICEF last year found
that 13 percent of people are still using contaminated
water. "That equates to 20 million people," says Yan
Zheng, a UNICEF arsenic specialist based in Dhaka.
"The health impacts vary. The skin lesions that
arsenic causes are well recognized by the villagers.
But the cancer and cardiovascular diseases are still
not fully recognized by the villagers and some health
professionals." Ms Zheng says a recent study showed
significantly higher death rates for those exposed to
arsenic: "It was as you would expect the higher the
exposure, the higher the risk."

Government and UN officials will publish a new
report tomorrow calling for urgent action to tackle
what remains a huge problem of contamination, both from drinking water and from crops
such as rice that are irrigated with contaminated water. According to the report, being
released to coincide with World Water Day, arsenic poses health risks to a significant
proportion of the population, though children are particularly vulnerable.

The skin lesions caused by arsenicosis are just the first sign of many possibly fatal health
problems. The lesions still attract widespread social stigma in
Bangladesh, with many people until recently believing they were the result
of a curse.

"Urgent action is needed to refocus the attention of the nation towards an
arsenic-safe environment," says Renata Lok Dessallien, the UN chief in
Bangladesh. "Concerted efforts by the government and all
stakeholders are necessary to reinvigorate arsenic
monitoring and mitigation efforts, and to conduct
comprehensive research on emerging threats."

The arsenic contaminating so much of
Bangladesh's water occurs naturally in the
water courses of the rivers that sustain
hundreds of millions of people. Many
underground sources around the world suffer
from arsenic contamination and there have
been health issues in countries ranging from
Argentina to Taiwan and India. There is also
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considerable arsenic contamination in parts of the US.

In Bangladesh, a fierce argument continues to rage over the responsibility for
the massive contamination. While aid groups and the UN insist their testing
at the time met international standards, others have argued that there should
have been a more thorough awareness of the local geology
and topography. Yet more have said that the UN
and the World Bank were slow to acknowledge
their role in the tragedy.

Dipankar Chakraborti, of the Jadavpur
University in West Bengal and a leading
expert, says the level of arsenic
contamination in Bangladesh is worse
than anywhere else globally. He says the
international bodies have never fully
acknowledged their role in a crisis that will
be played out for years to come. "It is a
major problem," he says. "We have found
that when we went back to people with skin
lesions whom we interviewed 15 years ago, about
30 percent of them had developed some sort of
cancer."

Last year scientists concluded that arsenic entered the water in tube wells as a result of
thousands of ponds that were dug across Bangladesh to provide soil for flood protection.
Disturbing the ground released the organic carbon, which in turn causes arsenic to leach
from sediments. The scientists from MIT in Boston concluded that one solution would be
to dig "deeper drinking-water wells, below the influence of the ponds".

Meanwhile, educating the public about the dangers of arsenic poisoning, and disabusing
them of the widespread idea that its effects are the result of a curse, or infectious, is
essential. "Raising awareness among people on the danger of arsenic is essential," says
Bangladesh's minister of health, Dr A F M Ruhal Haque. "Health workers can
disseminate this message, while the government will continue to invest in screening and
treatment of arsenicosis patients in affected districts."
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