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Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Richard Fuller of the Blacksmith Institute, an organization that is helping to clean up a toxic mine in northern Nigeria where at least 170 people, mostly children under five, have died after being exposed to high levels of lead.
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MARCO WERMAN: A contamination of another sort has occurred in Nigeria and so far it has claimed more than 170 lives, mostly children. It was discovered in a haunting way. While carrying out the country’s annual immunization program, officials realized there were hardly any children in several remote villages in northern Nigeria. The villagers said the children had died of malaria. But when a team from Doctors Without Borders administered blood tests, they discovered high concentrations lead among the locals. Richard Fuller heads the Blacksmith Institute, a non-profit that works in the developing world to clean up highly polluted areas. Blacksmith is helping in the lead affected villages in northern Nigeria. Richard Fuller, I understand the exposure occurred while the villagers were digging for gold. Is lead always a hazard in mining for gold?
RICHARD FULLER: What happened in this particular circumstance is that the ore that these villagers were processing for gold turned out to be very high in lead. That’s not common, but it’s not unknown also.
WERMAN: Most of those who died were children. Were they the ones actually digging in the gold mines or were they exposed back in their homes from something that brought the lead into their homes?
FULLER: You always brought into compounds of Muslim women by people that had mined it from an ore source near these villages. The material was brought in sacks and then was being processed inside the compounds of these villages. And of course the children are playing underfoot as women are doing the processing work to recover the gold out of the ore. It’s picked up by the children as they’re just wandering in the house and it’s highly toxic.
WERMAN: And just how toxic is lead?
FULLER: Well lead, at even low levels, causes long term neurological damage to children. At higher levels like this, it causes all kinds of terrible neurological acute problems with children in spasms, losing their ability to walk and talk. It’s not very often that you see levels that would actually lead to death, so the exposures here have just been really extraordinary. It’s quite an unprecedented situation.
WERMAN: Do you have a situation to compare it to? I’m just curious to know how much lead the children must have been exposed to in order to bring about death.
FULLER: Well, I would guess it’s as if the children were working in a factory that was making batteries, for example, where there were no controls whatsoever. It’s just something you would never, ever expose children to. The local population did not know that this ore had so much lead in it and that there was a problem from lead. They’re not well educated and they’re very poor. Average income in this part of the world is less than $2.00 a day.
WERMAN: If the number of deaths today is at least 170, do you expect more deaths from this incident among the women, perhaps, who are doing this work?
FULLER: Well the adults who have lead poisoning, and by the way pretty much everyone that has been tested by Doctors Without Borders and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta who have also been involved, has tested with blood lead levels that are above the range of the equipment that we send out there. No one is expecting to see ranges normally in any testing that are above 65 micrograms per deciliter. But in the 400-odd people that we tested, only 2 of them actually tested less than that number. So there will be problems for all people that have been exposed to this lead. Some people will be permanently damaged, where they’ll have mental retardation at very serious levels, and they’ll have loss of motor skills, some of them will be blinded, some of them will lose their voice capacity and for some of the people it will be permanent.
WERMAN: What is the neurological damage that is passed from a lead poisoned mother to an infant? Can we see this having effects for several or at least one generation out?
FULLER: Lead passes through breast milk into children as well. So mothers have high lead content in their own blood will pass it to suckling children. So there is a need to treat mothers and make sure that they’re not doing that. The most imperative thing to do right now is the emergency response of cleaning up these houses so that when the children return back to these compounds, there is no more ongoing exposure. There’s a lot of treatment that’s going on with Doctors Without Borders and the local government to treat these children and monitor them. And there are many, many, many children who have been exposed here. We don’t really have numbers, but it will be thousands of children that will be exposed here.
WERMAN: Richard Fuller with the Blacksmith Institute, a non-profit organization based in New York which is helping to clean up villages affected by lead poisoning in northern Nigeria. Richard, thank you very much indeed.
FULLER: It’s a pleasure.
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