Poisoned Blood, Ghaa, and the Infected Body: Lay Understandings of Arsenicosis in Rural Bangladesh

Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic data from rural Bangladesh to examine how community members affected by arsenicosis understand, explain, and experience this deadly illness. Biomedically, arsenicosis has been described as a disease caused by drinking arsenic-contaminated water, and it is manifested through physiological complications such as symmetric hyperkeratosis of the palms and soles, cancer of the skin, kidney and lungs, and diseases of the blood vessels. This article goes beyond such biomedical discourse and illustrates how arsenicosis has been vernacularized as ghaa in practice. It focuses on lay world views, logic, local knowledge systems, and sociocultural factors that shape popular understandings of the disease. This article is thus a contribution to our understanding of how arsenicosis, apart from its biomedical and clinical manifestations, is understood and experienced by affected individuals living within the particular sociocultural and ecological constraints of rural Bangladesh.

Keywords:

• arsenicosis
• arsenic-contaminated water
• Bangladesh
• lay health beliefs
• public health

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge Vineeta Sinha of the National University of Singapore for her insightful guidance on this research. Thanks to Alistair Wood, University of Brunei Darussalam, for his time to have a look at the draft of this paper. I also thankfully acknowledge the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable time to read this article and helpful comments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. Saiful Islam

M. Saiful Islam is a medical anthropologist and currently a lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University Brunei Darussalam. He is concurrently an assistant professor of Development Studies at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. His research interests include cultural understandings of and responses to chronic diseases, gender and health, healing systems, health and development, and the political economy of health care.