The Nigerian village that suffered one of the world's
worst recorded incidents of lead poisoning is now habitable and doctors
can start treating more than 1,000 contaminated children, a doctor and a
scientist from two international agencies said Friday.
For some, it already is too late to reverse serious neurological
damage, said Dr. Michelle Chouinard, Nigeria country director for
Doctors Without Borders, told The Associated Press on Friday.
Some children are blind, others paralyzed and many will struggle at
school with learning disabilities, she said.
Doctors Without Borders uncovered the scandal in 2010 but nothing was
done until this year about the worst-affected village, Bagega, because
the federal government did not provide a promised $3 million, the group
said.
The poisoning caused by artisanal mining from a gold rush killed at
least 400 children, yet villagers still say they would rather die of
lead poisoning than poverty, environmental scientist Simba Tirima told
the Associated Press Friday. Villagers make 10 times as much money
mining as they do from farming in an area suffering erratic rainfall
because of climate change, he said.
Managing five landfills with some 13,000 cubic meters (nearly 460,000
cubic feet) of highly contaminated soil, and teaching villagers how to
mine safely are major challenges to prevent new contamination, he said.
"That's a big, big worry. But I am joyful that for the kids who will be
born in Bagega, we have at least removed one of the major strikes
against them because they have so many strikes against them --
nutritional problems, diseases ..." said Tirima, who is the field
operations director in Nigeria for TerraGraphics International
Foundation.
The Moscow, Idaho-based foundation advised Nigeria's northern Zamfara
state government and oversaw the 5 1/2-month cleanup, or remediation, of
Bagega that ended two weeks ago.
There, people were exposed to mindboggling rates of lead contamination:
Some residential soil with up to 35,000 parts per million of lead and
the processing area with over 100,000 parts per million, Tirima said.
The United States considers 400 parts per million safe for residential
soil.
At the peak of the gold rush, Tirima said, more than 1,000 itinerant
miners and followers were camped around the village -- deep in the
countryside, beyond the reach of paved roads and electricity and quite
cut off in the rainy season when dirt roads become impassable.
Despite its remote location, the booming economy attracted people from
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger to Bagega, which also drew many locals as a
regional commercial centre with a primary and high school, a hospital
and weekly market. In addition, cattle herders and nomads came here to
water their animals at a reservoir so dangerously contaminated it killed
goats and cows.
The entire human population of 6,000 to 9,000 was exposed, including
some 1,500 children under the age of 5. Human Rights Watch said the
death toll of 400 was only an estimate as villagers initially tried to
hide the deaths, fearing the government would stop their illegal mining.
The group said it was the worst epidemic of its kind in modern history.
The government released money for the cleanup in February, Doctors
Without Borders began prescreening in March and found that nearly every
one of 1,010 children tested need therapy, Chouinard said. Of them, 267
are severely contaminated and will get chelation -- where medication
binds the lead to a child's blood and helps them to eliminate it faster
from their system.
All the children had more than the international standard maximum of 10
micrograms per decilitre of lead in their blood. Some had as much as
700 micrograms per decilitre, she said. The children will have to be
treated for one to two years, she said.
The more basic methods used to get at gold helped cause the poisoning.
Some women used hammers to beat open rock ore. Others used some of the
60 grinding mills at a processing area adjacent to the village and water
reservoir, Tirima said.
Many took the rocks that carried high concentrations of lead into their
homes for processing. The poisoning was facilitated because the
particular lead compounds are very toxic and easily absorbed into the
body, unlike other forms of lead, Tirima explained.
His TerraGraphics Foundation has trained dozens of Nigerians to clean
up any future contamination.
Government officials initially reacted by trying to enforce a ban on
illegal mining. When that did not work, they promised to find other
sources of income for villagers, but nothing has happened in a country
where corruption is endemic.
Tirima pointed to mounting evidence linking lead poisoning to crime
waves and said he fears for the community when their poisoned children
grow up.
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