One Wants to Go Home

Wijit Potha, 28 years old, was found dead on a recent morning by fellow workers who shared his spare living quarters near a construction site at Tanjong Pagar. One of these, Sawai Wanno, said Mr. Wijit had complained of a headache and taken a half-day off, but seemed fine at dinner. An autopsy found the cause of death to be heart failure.

Now Mr. Sawai says he is afraid and wants to break his contract and go home. Under a new policy announced on April 17, the Thai Embassy here and the Government in Bangkok say they will try to help.

The Straits Times of Singapore orginally drew attention to the problem, suggesting that the deaths resulted from Thais cooking their rice in pipes of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, which are readily available and free on construction sites, rather than in traditional bamboo rice cookers. When heated, some doctors said, the PVC pipes give off potentially toxic hydrogen chloride fumes.

The Thai Embassy issued leaflets warning the 20,000 Thais working legally here about the dangers of improvised PVC rice cookers. But not all Thais were using the pipes, and more digging produced the discomfiting information that more than 200 Thai workers had died mysteriously here since 1983. As with Mr. Wijit, the cause of death was usually put down to heart failure or bleeding lungs.

Deaths Reported Elsewhere

The Thai Public Health Ministry then said that more than 600 Thai workers had died in similar circumstances in the Middle East, where the bulk of the half-million or so Thais who work abroad are employed. Similar deaths have also been reported among Indochinese refugees in the United States, Japan and the Philippines.