Gold, and lead, bring illness and death in Nigeria

cory777

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Thu Jun-10-10 05:59 PM
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Gold, and lead, bring illness and death in Nigeria

Source: AP

YARGALMA, Nigeria – Mound after tiny mound of red clay earth dots the cemetery on the outskirts of this impoverished Nigerian village where grieving parents come to pray.

Children began falling ill months ago here and in a half-dozen other villages in this remote northern region on the cusp of the Sahara Desert. Some could not stand, some went blind or deaf.

Then they began dying.

Doctors suspected malaria. But they were wrong — after 160 died and hundreds more were ailing, blood tests revealed the real killer: Lead unearthed by villagers digging for gold.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100610/ap_on_he_me/af_nigeria_lead_poisoning

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JuniperLea

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Thu Jun-10-10 06:06 PM
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1. Blood gold... eom

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sam sarrha

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Thu Jun-10-10 06:29 PM
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2. well between that and the Jihad from the north.. the poor bastards are totally Screwn..

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dipsydoodle

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Thu Jun-10-10 06:34 PM
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3. I saw that on tv news here late last night in the UK.

Its because the villagers had , over a period of time , been smashing gold bearing rock to extract the gold within their village unaware that lead was leeching into the ground from the same rock. They've moved the "smashing" area away from the village now but tragicly too late.

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Karenina

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Thu Jun-10-10 06:48 PM
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4. Extraction costs. n/t

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Lagomorph

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Thu Jun-10-10 07:48 PM
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5. They've been doing it for...

...a millennia, but now the ore they are smashing has a higher lead level, if I'm reading right.

It's always something. Hopefully they'll wean themselves from the easy money, and not suffer the thousands of deaths our addiction to fossil fuel brings on us, every year.

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