On the twentieth anniversary of the Sambhavna Clinic, a preliminary report from a ground-breaking study has revealed that cancer incidence, in people exposed to the methyl isocynate (MIC) gas leak of 1984, is ten times greater than in the unexposed population.

Worryingly, Sambhavna’s pathologist has found a high proportion of abnormal PAP smears among women survivors, increasing fears for a connection between cervical cancer and gas exposure.

So many government hospitals have been built in Bhopal since the 1984 disaster, that, as the International Medical Commission on Bhopal (IMCB) has observed, there are more hospital beds per 1000 population here than in the USA or Europe.

Long before Union Carbide’s toxic gas, methyl-isocyanate (MIC), claimed tens of thousands of lives in Bhopal, it was the subject of more than a dozen medical studies in the United States.

In a sample of 865 women who lived within a kilometre of the plant and who were pregnant at the time of the gas leak, 43% of the pregnancies did not result in live births.