More than 400 children have died from the effects of lead poisoning in the northern Nigerian state of Zamfara. The deaths have occurred in a cluster of seven villages in the last six months.
The deaths came to light when the medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) was working with the Nigerian Ministry of Health to control an outbreak of meningitis in the area. According to the autumn edition of the newsletter Dispatches, MSF was contacted by a village chief. He told MSF, “Our children are dying. They have convulsions, they go into coma, they die.”
MSF brought in an epidemiologist. From the symptoms the epidemiologist suspected heavy metal poisoning. The results on tests of blood, urine, soil and water samples confirmed this, with extremely high levels of lead found in the samples.
The lead poisoning is the result of the small-scale, mostly illegal gold mining that has recently mushroomed. Nigeria is sub-Sahara’s second largest economy, but is ranked 154 out of 179 countries in the 2008 Human Development Index. Zamfara state in the north of Nigeria, whose economy is dominated by agriculture, has been one of the areas affected by food crisis that has hit the west African countries along the southern belt of the Sahel region.
A report in the Nigerian Inquirer in July by Uche Igwe, a visiting scholar at the Africa Program at John Hopkins University, describes the impact the gold mining in Zamfara has had. He writes that “the gold deposits in Zamfara state…have all been mined illegally. It is done by a ‘cartel’ that just shows up in these communities and begins to cart away the minerals...” Many of the cartels are from South Asia, especially China. They recruit local people, including women and children, to extract the gold...
IRIN quoted Umaru Na-Ta‘ala, a resident of Kirsa village, where 50 children have died, who explained, “The trade is profitable: it takes about two hours to extract one gram of gold, which miners can sell for US$23. In comparison, 50 kilograms of millet, which takes four months to cultivate, sells for $40.... We are apprehensive that disclosing the problem will make the government clamp down on our mining work.”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/oct2010/nige-o19.shtml
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