Here in North America, clean water is something we most certainly take for granted. We flush it down the toilet and the sink, we throw it out if it is not perfectly fresh. We're afraid of out perfectly clean tap water so we invest in expensive filters or buy our water from the store. And yet so many people out there would do anything for that tap water.

Here's a story from Dr. Gupta, CNN's medical correspondent, about a village in China that gets its water supply from the Hengshui River, which happens to be the river that receives heavy metal and mining deposits. On a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the most toxic--too toxic to safely touch, let alone ingest--the Hengshui rates a staggering 5. Full of known carcinogens like arsenic, lead, zinc and cadmium, the water is slowly killing the people who rely on it, and they have no choice but depend on this water source -- there are no others.

I can't imagine living in a world where the price you pay for water is your life, where you can't rely on anyone to step in and make sure you have a clean water supply. It's truly heartbreaking.

Arsenic trioxide sold under the brand name Trisenox, is approved for patients with a rare leukemia named acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL).

APL is a form of acute myeloid leukemia, about 1,500 people are diagnosed every year with this rare disease. Standard treatment involves chemotherapy and a form of vitamin A -- alltrans retinoic acid. This therapy helps about 70-80 percent of patient gain long term-remissions. About 25 percent of patients do relapse and are no longer responsive to treatment.These patients often are treated with arsenic trioxide.

A study was sponsored by The National Cancer Institute to see if the addition of arsenic trioxide along with the standard therapy for first line treatment would prove better survival rates.

Nearly 20 percent of women and eight percent of men with lung cancer have never smoked, say researchers involved in a study of one million people in the United States and Sweden. The likely culprit in these lung cancer cases is secondhand smoke.

It's not yet clear why women are more likely to develop the disease. Perhaps they are more susceptible to all forms of smoking -- whether direct or secondhand -- or maybe because more men smoke than women, women are more likely to be exposed to secondhand smoke.

While smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, there are other factors to blame for disease incidence. Radon, asbestos, chromium, and arsenic are all associated with lung cancer.

According to the American Cancer Society, lung cancer will be diagnosed in 213,000 Americans in 2007. The disease will kill 160,000.

Employing modern day pathological and tumor-staging methods, University of Texas Southwestern researchers have concluded that French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte died from advanced gastric cancer resulting from a chronic bacteria infection, H. pylori bacteria.

While Napoleon's personal physician Francesco Antommarchi stated at the time of Napoleon's death that the ruler of France had died from stomach cancer, an alternative and popular theory that has persisted down through the centuries after his death suggested Napoleon was killed by prolonged arsenic poisoning. Apparently, not so.

By studying historical accounts, the researchers determined that the advancement of gastric cancer was such that even modern day treatments would not have prolonged Napoleon's life. Professor of pathology and internal medicine Dr. Robert Genta stated, "Even if treated today, he'd have been dead within a year."

Napoleon's father died from stomach cancer, but the researchers dismiss that heredity played a role in the development of Napoleon's gastric cancer. Dr. Genta explains, "The ulcerated lesion on the emperor's stomach suggests a history of chronic H. pylori gastritis, which might have increased his risk of gastric cancer. The risk might have been further increased by his diet full of salt-preserved foods but sparse in fruits and vegetables – common fare for long military campaigns."

To learn details of the study into Napoleon's death from gastric cancer, and the methods used by the researchers, read University of Texas Southwestern's Napoleon's mysterious death unmasked.

Three days ago, I went all Erin Brockovich about the news that wasn't being reported in the news reports about the Nevada Cancer Institute opening offices in Elko and Fallon. As initially reported by the local Nevada television and print media, this was an effort to help provide outreach, education and support to the projected 11,000 Nevadans who will be diagnosed with cancer this year. At that time, not one of the news reports mentioned anything about the water supply, or the fact that Fallon is classified as a cancer cluster town, or why the offices were being opened. Days later, you can go here, and here, and even here, to be told that University of Arizona scientists think they may have a found the reason for the unusually high number of childhood cancer cases in Sierra Vista and Fallon, Nevada.

University of California and Chilean researchers study results report children exposed to high levels of arsenic in their drinking water are seven to 12 times more likely to die of lung cancer and other lung diseases in young adulthood. The risk of dying due to bronchiectasis, usually a rare lung disease, is 46 times higher than normal if the child's mother also drank the arsenic-contaminated water while pregnant.

"I sometimes ponder the improbability that drinking water with concentrations of arsenic less than one-thousandth of a gram per liter could do this, and think that I've got to be wrong. But our years of working with arsenic exposure in India and Chile tie in with this study perfectly," states Allan Smith, professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health.

According to the study, arsenic is particularly prevalent in a province in the north of Chile, one of the driest places on earth. In 1958, the cities of Antofagasta and neighboring Mejillones tapped into arsenic-laden rivers to supply their growing populations with water. For the next 13 years, the water supply for all residents in the cities was laced with an average of 860 micrograms per liter of arsenic. In contrast, the standard for arsenic in drinking water in the United States was 50 micrograms per liter, now 10 micrograms per liter. The Chilean cities became a tragic natural experiment for studying the effects of arsenic on humans.

Further information from the study states that, "Putting these results in perspective, studies have found that the rates of early-adult lung cancer among survivors of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki exposed to high levels of radiation before birth or as children are many times lower than those in Antofagasta and Mejillones. Only active smoking itself results in lung cancer rates higher than the seven-fold increase found in his study." It's chilling to consider how global this problem might be. Less than fifteen years ago, elevated concentrations of arsenic were reported in the drinking water in the desert where I lived, right here in the United States. The research will appear in the July issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, and will be made available online. Environmental Health Perspectives has made the 27-page abstract available now, as a PDF document.