CDC says Nigeria lead poisoning crisis 'unprecedented'

CDC says Nigeria lead poisoning crisis 'unprecedented'

arabnews.com

GUSAU, Nigeria: Doctors are struggling to save children stricken by lead poisoning — many of them blind, deaf and unable to walk — after poor herdsmen began illegally mining gold in an area of northern Nigeria with high concentrations of lead.

More than 160 villagers have died and hundreds more have been sickened in the remote villages of Nigeria's Zamfara state, officials said Tuesday. The region is near the border with Niger, on the cusp of the Sahara Desert.

A spokeswoman for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency's initial tests found extremely high l

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Where is the UN? Why is this allowed to happen?

Raping the country for their resources and killing the poor?

It looks like this situation could get worse as the fear is that the upcoming rains will spread more and more lead into the drinking water and spread it to other villages.

Who are the companies that are running these mining operations?

They should be held accountable for this human tragedy, and the mining needs to cease.

arabnews.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

This situation begs for clarity.

Are the villagers still "illegally" mining on their own ?

If so, education must become the priority. Are they not killing themselves ?

Poverty begats . . . chances.

I hope the rains do not worsen the situation. Tragic.

reply to post by SIEGE


It sounds like a terrible situation for those people, but I couldn't even find one article regarding this on this Nigerian news site:

www.compassnewspaper.com...

The first article mentioned that this rash of poisonings were credited to malaria at first, could the Nigerian government be trying to keep this out of the news as well?

This is still going on more children have died:

No fewer than 400 children have died of lead poisoning in northern part of the country, the Human Rights Watch has said. The areas affected include villages such as Abare, Dareta, Duza, Sunke, Tungar Daji, Tungar Guru and Yargalma in Zamfara State, with the mortality rate estimated as high as 40 per cent among children who showed symptoms of lead poisoning. The organisation said this at a news conference in Lagos on Tuesday, adding that thousands of children in northern states would need immediate medical treatment. According to HRW representative in Nigeria, Jane Cohen, dozens of villages in Zamfara State were contaminated since two years by lead, spreading epidemic across the community. While releasing the video on the issue, Cohen said 400 children had died, according to official estimates, yet environmental clean-up efforts had not even begun in numerous affected villages. Human Rights Watch said that Artisanal gold mines were found throughout Zamfara State, in north-western Nigeria, and high levels of lead in the earth and the use of rudimentary mining methods had resulted in an epidemic of lead poisoning among children. Research by Human Rights Watch also showed that children were exposed to this lead dust when they processed ore in the mines, when their miner relatives returned home covered with lead dust, and when the lead-filled ore is manually or mechanically crushed at home.

hisz.rsoe.hu...


www.voanews.com...
This is a link to VOA, Voice of America that discusses efforts to clean this up and the Governments response.