Gold fever brought death to Umoru Musa’s nine-family compound in Sunke, a mud-brick village in northern Nigeria.
Five of the 25 children, including Musa’s 1-year-old daughter Nafisa, lost their lives in May after villagers ground ore from nearby hills they didn’t know were also loaded with lead. Rising prices for gold promised a windfall. Instead, they helped unleash the deadliest lead-poisoning crisis in modern medical history.
As the adults pulverized rocks with their grain grinder, they spewed lead dust across the ground where their children played and poultry grazed. They spread more of the material, lethal to children in high doses, around the communal well where they washed the ore to sift out the gold.
“This gold cost us a lot,” Musa, 40, said in the open-air courtyard of his home last month as a clean-up team in white respirator masks cleared away lead-laden dirt. “There is nothing God can give that is better than a human being.”
At least 284 children under the age of five have died from lead poisoning in eight villages in Nigeria’s Zamfara state as a result of small-scale gold mining, according to government officials. An additional 742 are being treated for high levels of lead in their blood, a number which may rise to 3,000 by the end of next year, according to Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders.
Health effects from lead poisoning, including brain damage and miscarriages, will plague the area for years, said Joseph Graziano, professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York.
The deaths are an unintended consequence of a 21st-century gold rush. Villagers turned en masse to mining over the past two years, spurred on by more frequent visits from gold-buying middlemen. During that time, investors drove bullion prices up 58 percent in London as they sought a haven from the aftermath of the financial crisis. Gold reached a record $1,431.25 an ounce in London on December 7.
In Nigeria, soil from 29 villages has shown unsafe lead levels for children, according to preliminary tests by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The crisis is “unprecedented” for the number of deaths and the amount of lead found in the children, according to Atlanta-based CDC, which has helped set up testing and treatment in the area. Some cases were measured at about 15 times the level that calls for immediate treatment, said Médecins Sans Frontières, an international humanitarian organization often referred to as MSF.
“I’m stunned to learn of an epidemic of this severity and magnitude at a time when lead poisoning in the developed world is truly diminishing,” said Graziano, who with two colleagues discovered the lead-treatment drug now being used in Nigeria. “This has a morbid novelty of poor people trying to find a source of income only to encounter this massive exposure.”
In June, Nigeria’s federal government banned all mining in Zamfara state, which is in the country’s northern Muslim area. Yet lead levels found in a few compounds in October show that some families were grinding the ore in their homes again, according to aid workers and local officials.
Blacksmith Institute, a New York-based charity working on the cleanup effort, has a total budget for the project of about $950,000, most from the United Nations Children’s Fund, known as Unicef, said John Keith, Blacksmith’s head of operations in Nigeria.
Blacksmith is seeking an additional $2 million to extend the efforts to more contaminated villages and provide long-term training to help Nigerian agencies deal with the problems.
“It would be a lovely and appropriate response to find that people who have profited very much so from this run-up looked to give back a little,” said Richard Fuller, Blacksmith’s president. Nigeria’s small-scale miners “are just trying to pull themselves from the very bottom of the poverty rung and artisanal mining is one of the best ways of increasing local economic development, all over the world,” he said.
* It is sad to see these kind of things happening in the bull market of the metals
