The dust-jacket shows cupped palms in a pose eerily reminiscent of that used by the US insurance company that bills itself: "The Good Hands People". The skin, however, is pigmented by the black raindrop pattern of melanosis characteristic of chronic arsenic poisoning. The victim is one of a predicted 350,000 people in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, who will develop fatal cancers over the next ten years. As one of the poorest nations in the world, Bangladesh has long lacked even necessities such as safe drinking water for its burgeoning population. Before the early 1970s, a quarter of a million children died each year from water-borne communicable diseases such as cholera and dysentery. In what better hands to place this catastrophe than those of UNICEF, the United Nations children's fund?
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