The 1984 Bhopal gas disaster is one of India’s worst industrial disasters, may have led to men born during and after the accident having a higher risk of developing disabilities and cancer later in life, the study.
Research published in the journal BMJ Open suggests that industrial accidents can have a much longer-term and serious impact on people’s health than just the immediate consequences.
“Our work finds evidence that one of India’s worst industrial disasters, the December 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, may have led to men who were in utero at the time of the accident having a higher risk of developing disability and cancer later in life ,” said the study’s corresponding author Gordon McCord, associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, US.
“The results also suggest that the Bhopal gas disaster affected people over a significantly wider area than previously demonstrated,” McCord said in a statement.
The Bhopal incident involved a methyl isocyanate gas leak at a pesticide factory and a toxic gas leak that spread over a 7 kilometer radius, exposing more than half a million people in the city of Bhopal to the gas and leading to more than 20,000 deaths in the region.
Bhopal gas disaster :leak also affected groundwater and the reproductive health
“Hundreds of thousands of survivors had serious long-term and chronic health consequences, including respiratory, neurological, musculoskeletal, ophthalmic and endocrine effects,” said study co-author Prashant Bharadwaj, a professor in UC San Diego’s Department of Economics.
The toxins from the leak also affected groundwater and the reproductive health and other health outcomes of exposed women, suggesting that generations not directly exposed to the toxic gas may still have suffered adverse health and social impacts from the event.
The study also cites previous literature that found, for example, that there was a four-fold increase in miscarriage rates following a gas leak, as well as an increased risk of stillbirth and neonatal mortality.
However, this study is the first to comprehensively examine the multigenerational effects of such an event and recognizes the potential far-reaching effects by examining these effects on children born to women who survived the Bhopal gas disaster.
Bhopal gas disaster :Adult cancer rates and disability
The researchers looked at official health and education data, such as the National Family Health Survey, to estimate the long-term health effects specifically, adult cancer rates and disability and educational attainment of people who were exposed to the leaking gas in the womb or as children in 1984 .
They also used data to examine the health effects of exposure to the event among 47,817 people aged 15-49 living in Madhya Pradesh in 2015-16, as well as socio-economic data on 13,369 men born between 1960 and 1990. The data also included 1,260 people born between 1981 and 1985 to women who lived within 250 km of Bhopal.
“Our analysis of the results showed that the gas leak had long-term intergenerational effects, showing that men who were in utero at the time and whose mothers lived near Bhopal were more likely to have a disability that affected their employment 15 years later,” said co-author study by Anita Raj, a professor in the departments of medicine and educational studies at UC San Diego.
“They also had eight times the risk of cancer and lower educational attainment more than 30 years later compared to adults who were born before or after the disaster and lived further from Bhopal,” Raj said.
The researchers also found changes in the sex ratio of children born in 1985, suggesting an effect of the event up to 100 km from the accident.
Women who lived within 100 km of Bhopal experienced a relative decline in male births compared to women in the 1985 cohort – 64 per cent of babies born between 1981 and 1984 were male, the proportion falling to 60 per cent in 1985 – while women living above 100 km had no difference in sex ratio between the 1981–1984 and 1985 groups.
The researchers said the study had some limitations in that the people included would have been exposed to the dangerous gas over a wide range, and the calculations could have been affected by migration and mortality.
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