Public health lessons from the Bhopal chemical disaster.

THE 1984 CHEMICAL disaster in Bhopal, India, was first and foremost a terrible human tragedy. For those who were there and even for those at considerable distances who read about it, the reality of 2000 or more persons dead and many tens of thousands poisoned by a toxic cloud is horrifying. However, in its particulars and complexities, Bhopal's chemical disaster can also serve as a case example for almost any discipline taught in a school of public health. The disaster has elements of acute and chronic epidemiology, industrial hygiene, toxicology, environmental pollution and planning, disaster preparedness and management, health economics, medical ethics, and environmental protection law, to name a few. Mehta et al1 review the literature on the Bhopal disaster and its aftermath and focus on the long-term health effects.