Ep 127 Bhopal: The 1984 Union Carbide Disaster

This Podcast Will Kill You

Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

Health & Fitness, Science

4.8 • 17.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2023

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the night of December 2, 1984, a deadly gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India led to what has been described as the world’s worst industrial disaster. In the immediate aftermath of the gas leak, thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands were injured from exposure to the toxic gas methyl isocyanate. But long after the international headlines and news reports dwindled to silence, long after Union Carbide paid a paltry settlement to survivors, long after the disaster faded from much of the world’s memory, the gas leak continues to haunt the residents of Bhopal. In this episode, we trace the path of methyl isocyanate from initial discovery to the night of the disaster and the years that followed. We then explore what about this gas makes it so very deadly before assessing how the contamination still present at the site is causing health problems for residents decades after the gas leak.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Many put their hope in Dr. Serhat.
0:02.6	His company was worth half a billion dollars.
0:05.2	His research promised groundbreaking treatments for HIV and cancer.
0:09.5	But the brilliant doctor was hiding a secret.
0:12.9	You can listen to Doctor Death, bad magic,
0:15.4	exclusively an ad free by subscribing to Wundry Plus in the Wundry app.
0:20.4	The situation in which the two doctors found themselves was more horrific than any war story or tragedy they might have read about.
0:28.0	What I liked more than anything else about my profession was being able to relieve suffering, Gonday would say, and there I was
0:36.2	unable to do that. It was unbearable. Quite apart from hemorrhaging of the lungs and cataclysmic suffocation, he found himself confronted
0:45.5	with symptoms that were unfamiliar to him.
0:48.2	Sionosis of the fingers and toes, spasms in the esophagus and intestines, attacks of blindness, muscular convulsions,
0:56.5	fevers and sweating so intense that victims wanted to tear off their clothes.
1:02.4	Worst of all was the incalculable number of living dead making for the hospital as if it were a lifeboat in a shipwreck. You're going to. Oh, I'm going to be a tough episode to do.
1:57.0	So that.
1:58.0	Yeah, definitely. So that was an excerpt from a book called Five Pass Midnight in
2:08.9	Bo-Paul, the epic story of the world's deadliest industrial disaster by Dominic La Pierre and Javier Morrow.
2:17.0	And hi, I'm Aaron Welsh.
2:20.0	And I'm Aaron Alman Updike.
2:22.0	And this is, this podcast will kill you.
2:24.0	And today, like the book title suggests,
2:27.0	we're talking about the Bo-Paul Gas Leak,
2:30.0	which is one of the most important stories that most of us have probably never heard of.
	...

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