Lead poisoning kills over 400 children under five since March 2010 in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

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Source: http://www.apanews.net/apa.php?page=show_article_eng&id_article=125692

Nigeria-Lead-Poison


Lead poisoning kills over 160 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State


APA - Lagos (Nigeria) The Zamfara State government in northern Nigeria has approved N240 million (about US$1.6 million) for rapid response towards controlling the outbreak of lead poisoning which has so far killed over 160 people, mainly children, in Anka and Bukkuyum local government areas of the state.

Following a report of Nigeria?s Federal Ministry of Health on Friday in Abuja, indicating that 163 deaths out of 353 cases of lead poisoning in the two local government areas, emanated from mining activities, the Zamfara State Commissioner for Health, Dr Sa`ad Idris, told journalists on Saturday in Gusau that the state government was disturbed by the development.

?The State Government is seriously disturbed by the development and is doing everything possible in collaboration with international organisations to control the situation,? he said.

Idris said the money would be used in the purchase of drugs and other infection control facilities as well as the excavation and disposal of contaminated soil from the mining areas.

The lead poisoning is said to emanate from some illegal gold mining activities being carried out in those parts of the state. Therefore, as part of a quick intervention approach to stem the mining activities, Idris said that the State Government had already removed all mining machines belonging to illegal miners from the areas.

He said that the state government would from next week start removing the contaminated soil, replacing it with hazard-free soil and cement.

Idris said that the victims, who were mostly children, are admitted at Bukkuyum General Hospital in Gusau for medical attention.

He also said that the government would bring experts to assist in developing safer mining and mineral processing practices in the state.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan had during his state visit to Zamfara State last week directed miners to respect international environmental practices.

Jonathan also cautioned communities living around the mining areas to be conscious of environmental hazards that might emanate from mining activities.

 

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Re: Lead poisoning kills over 160 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Re: Lead poisoning kills over 160 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hSwoZgCl6S9-rr5E8rEPrvHBOj8A

Deadly lead poisoning under control in Nigeria: minister

(AFP) ? 2 hours ago

ABUJA ? Nigeria said Monday it has contained an outbreak of lead poisoning linked to illegal gold mining in northern Nigeria that has left 163 dead, including more than 100 children.

"The outbreak is now under control and there is no need for the general public to panic," junior health minister Suleiman Bello told reporters.

A lead poisoning epidemic has hit five villages in Nigeria's northwest Zamfara State in recent weeks, affecting 226 children aged five and under, 111 of whom died.

In all 355 cases were recorded since January with blood specimens showing high levels of lead traced to gold mining in the poverty stricken villages.

"The cases are receiving treatment and environmental remediation or decontamination is ongoing in the affected communities," added the minister...

 

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Re: Lead poisoning kills over 160 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Re: Lead poisoning kills over 160 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Source: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/market_news/article.jsp?content=D9G78TO80

From Jon Gambrell, June 8, 2010 - 2:41 PM
CDC: Nigerian lead poisoning outbreak 'unprecedented' as doctors struggle to help ill children
By Jon Gambrell

GUSAU, Nigeria (AP) - 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 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency's initial tests found extremely high levels of lead in the blood of adults and children, who are the most susceptible to the illness.

"The scope of the poisoning is unprecedented in CDC's work with lead poisoning worldwide," said agency spokeswoman Vivi Adams. "This is because of the severity of the poisoning, the number of fatalities, the large number of children and adults with symptomatic poisoning and the extent of the environmental contamination..."

 

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Re: Lead poisoning kills over 160 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Re: Lead poisoning kills over 160 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Source: http://www.france24.com/en/20100611-race-against-time-sanitize-lead-epidemic-hit-nigeria

11 June 2010 - 18H17

Race against time to sanitize lead-epidemic hit Nigeria

AFP - Armed with hoes and shovels, men clad in protective suits carefully and steadily excavate a layer of soil contaminated with dangerous levels of lead around a homestead in northern Nigeria.

The farming village, one of six hit by a lead poisoning epidemic linked to illegal gold mining in northern Nigeria, has lost 61 children in recent weeks.

Foreign environmental experts aided by dozens of young men from the village have slowly started the painstaking exercise to clean up homes with high lead contamination.

The plan is to decontaminate six villages in northern Nigeria?s Zamfara state affected by lead poisoning which has killed hundreds of people, especially children in recent months.

"It is a simple process of taking off five centimetres of the soil and replacing it with clean soil because the lead is still on the surface," Ian von Linden of the US-based environmental engineering firm Terra Graphics, who is heading the operation, told AFP.

Workers stuff the lead-bearing soil into plastic grain sacks and heap it outside the mud huts awaiting disposal.

As simple as the cleaning up process may appear, experts and villagers fear it could be stalled by a four-month long rainy season which has just started.

"We are in a good-bad situation. Rains in some sense might help us by washing away some of the lead but the real downside is that it can push the lead deeper than the soil thickness we are taking off and if that happens we have to wait till the end of the season," said Linden.

At least 70 of the 112 homes in this 2,000-strong remote village with lead levels up to 125 times higher than the standard amount of lead exposure accepted for residential soil have been slated for clean up, but nine days into the exercise work has started in only two homes.

"We are under a kind of pressure," said Linden.

And the decontaminators need to move faster. Already the neighbouring Abare village which lost over 100 children to the lead poisoning is "crying for urgent attention", one of the environmentalists said.

"We have a bigger problem than we know, surveillance is very poor. The two villages are just a tip of the iceberg," the expert said on condition of anonymity, adding that the official casualty figure has been underestimated.

Nigerian health officials maintain that 355 people have been poisoned since the start of year out of whom 163 died, 111 of them children below the age of five.

"There have been more deaths from lead poisoning here than in the whole world combined in the last 40 years," Linden said.

Remote and with a rough terrain, Dareta village, like most villages in the area, is only accessible by four-wheel drive cars. Village ruler Muhammad Bello is disturbed at the prospect that the village might be rendered totally inaccessible, should the rains intensify.

High heaps of clean soil just delivered dot parts of the village and more deliveries are coming in. The region recorded its first heavy rains late this week which muddied the roads, making it more difficult to traverse by even by all-terrain cars.

"We hope the work is finished in less than a month otherwise the village will be cut off because we have no bridges to cross the streams that fill up with the heavy rains," Bello said.

In addition to the dead, there are over 300 children with high lead contamination well above hospitalization levels, according to Linden.

At least 20 of the children have shown signs of neurological disorder and been seized by occasional bouts of mental imbalance and abnormal behaviour, said residents.

Survivors are at risk of various degrees of brain damage and the longer it takes to treat them the worse they could get, said Linden.

Here children still play around the ponds and the open wells used for the final stages of gold extracting processes and already identified to have high lead levels.

Medecin Sans Frontiers (MSF) which has set up a clinic at Bukkuyum, 80 kilometres away to treat lead-poisoned children from nearby Yargalma village, where over 100 toddlers died, plan to set up one in Dareta in coming weeks, according to its project leader, Andreas Haggstrom.

 

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Re: Lead poisoning kills over 200 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Re: Lead poisoning kills over 200 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Zamfara State lead poisoning saga: Victims risk permanent brain damage

* High treatment cost, staff constraint, community apathy challenge response initiative

By Sola Ogundipe

Excerpts:


Offloading sacks of the contaminated topsoil at the dump site. Photo by Sola Ogundipe


Dr. Alhassan Hamisu Dama, a medical personnel supervising the treatment of victims in Dareta village in Anka Local Government Area of the State, confirmed that most of those who died were children aged five years and below.

?I cannot say precisely, but more than 200 children died and that is why we are concentrationg on treating victims of that age group,? he told Good Health Weekly during a visit to the affected community.

Dama who urged for financial and technical assistance from the Federal Government and other humanitarian agencies said: ?We came here and tested blood samples of the people, we also took samples of the soil and water for testing and found that levels of soil that were between 28,000-100,000 times above the normal levels of 400 microgrammes per decilitre.

According to the medic, in the blood, the normal level is of less than 10 microgrammes per decilitre. ?But when we tested them, all the victims had more than 65,000 microgrammes per decilitre lead blood levels. The implication of this is that many of them might have suffered permanent brain damage and the damage is likely to affect their intelligence and they might show other manifestations of damage to the central nervous system.?

As part of the palliative measures put in place under the response initiative, it is compulsory for all children with lead levels above 65 microgrammes per decilitre in their blood to be placed on a special therapy that would protect them from advancement of the complications.

However, the permanent brain damage is already there. We are also limiting the exposure to the lead, as all the contaminated soil in the households and the immediate environment has been cleaned up and replaced by clean topsoil.

High cost of treatment

Among other challenges, the high cost of treatment is paramount. Dama, who remarked that the treatment for children is fund demanding, said to place just one child on the complete dose of drug treatment requires about N400,000.

?Right now, we are estimating that each child on admission is consuming to the tune of N480,000 in the hospital. Then there is the lack of cooperation from some of the villagers, some of who do not want to take their children to the hospital. This is another big challenge we are having.?

During the visit, Good Health Weekly observed that many of the affected villages have the challenge of response. At the Anka General Hospital, Dr. Orimode of the Medicins Sans Fracias (MSF) said the treatment regimen would continue to be focused on children under five years as well as pregnant women and nursing mothers because of their vulnerability.

?We are focusing on under fives. For the very, very young and nursing mothers, lead poisoning is very dangerous. At the last count, today (July 6) we have on admission 60 patients from Bukkuyum and Dareta LGAs, but we are expecting at least 30 more pateients later today from Dareta.?

He explained that 37 patients had been discharged earlier following four weeks of radiation therapy designed to enable the blood lead level to drop below the 65 micro grammes per decilitre limit.

Infants and children affected by the lead poisoning saga in Zamfara State are at risk of suffering permanent brain damage as a result of prolonged exposure to the toxic effects of lead, that has killed more than 200 children in five communities of two Local Govenment Areas of the State.

Already, high cost of treatment coupled with shortage of hospital staff, reluctance by parents in the affected communities to surrender their children for treatment and inaccessibility of some affected villages continue to be major factors militating against the response drive spearheaded by the Zamfara State government.

Increasing activities of illegal miners and improper processing of lead-contaminated gold ore within households in the community, were largely responsible for the high death toll.

Other constraints

Orimode however lamented that there were major challenges militating against the smooth running of the reponse. ?There is serious staff shortage. At the momemt in this hospital, there is a total of 14 medical staff made up of 11 Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWS) and three doctors.

?There are also logistics issues as well as with the community members some of who are not readily willing to bring their children to the hospital for treatment.

?We are trying to get more people to come forward and access the available treatment facilities, but we cannot force them. We are only appealling to them through emlightenment programmes and reach-out campaigns.?

No plan to evacuate communities

Meanwhile there are no immediate plans to evacuate people from their homes in Dareta or other villages moreso because the soil contamination is superficial. A source from the State Ministry of Health noted that the threat of spread of the contamination had been effectively checked, hence there was no immediate danger to residents within the affected communities. Already, excavation of the topsoil from 3 to 6 centimetres deep and replacement with fresh soil has been completed in 102 compounds in the town.

The Zamfara State Ministry of Health was first informed of deaths occurring among children in Yargalma village, Bukkuyum LGA and in Dareta, Abare and Tunga Daji villages in Anka LGA presenting with symptoms such as abdominal pain, vomiting and convulsions.

In-depth investigation in the two villages confirmed the large outbreak of childhood death and illness caused by acute lead poisoning. Blood surveys in the two villages later indicated a 100 percent prevalence of high blood lead levels (>10 ug/dL) among children under the age of 5 years in both villages with 95 per cent of the children need chelation therapy.

A report by the Centers for Diseases Control (CDC) confirmed that the environmental contamination and timing of the outbreak were related to recent increase in illegal mining activities and the greater involvement of women and children in processing lead contaminated gold ore in their homes.

From the CDC report, two thirds of the compounds surveyed reported having at least one mining activity inside the compound involviing breaking down ore rocks or grinding of ore gravel.

Other activities include washing of ground ore gravel, drying of the ground materials, separating mercury from gold, and melting / burning the mercury off.

Between March 30, 2010 and July 6, 2010 when Good Health Weekly visited the community, over 250 cases meeting the case definition had been reported from Dareta, Kasumke, Abare, Tunga Daji and Duza towns, all in Anka LGA.

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2010/07/...ing-saga-victims-risk-permanent-brain-damage/

 

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Re: Lead poisoning kills over 200 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Re: Lead poisoning kills over 200 people in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/22/nigeria-lead-poisoning-deaths-gold-rush



Nigeria gold rush sees 200 children killed in outbreak of lead poisoning

UN sends emergency team to Zamfara state as processing of ore by hand affects 18,000 people

o Xan Rice in Nairobi
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 September 2010 19.10 BST

An unprecedented outbreak of lead poisoning linked to a gold rush has killed at least 200 children in northern Nigeria this year, with a further 18,000 people affected.

Announcing the figures, the UN said it had sent an emergency team to assess the full impact of the "acute massive lead poisoning" in Zamfara state, where seven villages have so far been confirmed as contaminated. In all cases, villagers had been grinding ore by hand to search for gold when they unwittingly freed lead particles also contained in the rock...

 

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Lead poisoning kills over 400 children under five since March 2010 in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

NIGERIA: Communities? resistance hampers lead cleanup

ANKA, 1 October 2010 (IRIN) - Efforts to treat children poisoned by lead and to clean up contaminated sites in northern Nigeria's Zamfara State are being hampered by the reticence of communities to divulge cases, for fear of a government ban on lucrative illegal gold mining.

Lead poisoning linked to informal mining has killed over 400 children under five since March 2010, according to the United Nations. M?decins Sans Fronti?res (MSF), the medical relief agency, noticed high numbers of convulsions and deaths among children in Dareta and Yargalma villages in Zamfara State in March 2010, and started investigating.

"The figures are far higher than that," El-Shafi'i Muhammad Ahmad, MSF programme coordinator in Anka, northwestern Nigeria, told IRIN. "Communities deny such deaths or attribute them to spirits and other beliefs."

"The reluctance of communities to disclose ... lead-related illnesses or deaths, and ... where they conduct mining activities, is seriously hampering our efforts to identify communities at risk and pencil them down for decontamination," Ian von Linden, head of Terra Graphic, a US-based environmental engineering firm heading decontamination efforts, told IRIN. "In some cases it takes two weeks to convince a community to open up."

Heavy rains have further delayed clean-up efforts. Terra Graphic prioritized seven villages ? Abare, Sunke, Dareta, Tungar Daji, Duza, Yargalma, Tungar Guru ? to be decontaminated from June 2010, but has only worked in Dareta and Yargalma because rain made the others inaccessible.

Terra Graphic, with support from the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), is helping Zamfara State authorities decontaminate. Teams from the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) and the UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) arrived in Anka on 23 September to analyze the ground water.

Children most at risk

The short-term effects of lead poisoning include convulsions, loss of consciousness, and blindness; serious long-term effects are anaemia, renal failure, brain damage, and impotence, said MSF's El-Shafi'i Muhammad Ahmad.

Contamination is particularly harmful to young children due to their low immunity, and can result in death. MSF runs camps in the towns of Anka and Bukkuyum to treat children with severe and acute lead contamination.

In Zamfara State men bring home gold ore from mining sites, which their wives crush to powder with a hammer or grinding stone before flushing it with water to remove the sand and retain the gold. Young children, who are usually beside their mothers, inhale this dust, Ahmad told IRIN.

Some 3,600 children under five live in the seven most affected villages, according to a Terra Graphic survey, but four more villages were recently designated as being at severe risk. A joint study by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Health Ministry of Zamfara State identified 180 villages where children may have been poisoned by lead, which means that up to 30,000 people could be affected.

Lucrative trade

Farming and herding communities in the mineral-rich southern part of Zamfara State have been engaged in illegal artisanal gold mining and processing the ore for over two decades.

The trade is profitable: it takes about two hours to extract about one gram of gold, which miners can sell for US$23. In comparison, 50 kg of millet, which takes four months to cultivate, sells for $40, said Umaru Na-Ta'ala, who lives in Kirsa village, where 50 children have died and there have been 20 stillbirths since 2010.

Villagers only spoke out about these deaths in July, when members of a state government "lead taskforce" - made up of environment and health ministry representatives, local chiefs, MSF, Terra Graphic, and WHO - visited their village. "We are apprehensive that disclosing the problem will make the government clamp down on our mining work," Na-Ta?ala told IRIN.

Terra Graphic decontaminates homes and villages by removing 3cm of top-soil ? the extent to which contamination usually goes ? and replaces it with clean soil. It then buries the contaminated soil away from the villages.

aa/aj/he

http://irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=90653

 

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Re: Lead poisoning kills over 400 children under five since March 2010 in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/11/30/nigeria.gold.mining.lead.poisoning/?hpt=C2

Gold rush triggers deadly lead poisoning in Nigeria
By Christian Purefoy, CNN
November 30, 2010 -- Updated 1238 GMT (2038 HKT)

Sunke, Nigeria (CNN) -- Standing at the local graveyard, Mohammed Abubakar cannot find the grave of the son he unwittingly poisoned. The grass has grown too high.

"He started convulsing and vomiting," Abubakar said. "Everywhere we went, we could not get medicine. And then, he died."

His son is among an estimated 400 children who have died and 30,000 others who have been poisoned in Zamfara state, northern Nigeria, since March in the world's worst recorded outbreak of lead poisoning...

 

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Re: Lead poisoning kills over 400 children under five since March 2010 in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...n-as-miners-belatedly-discover-lead-dust.html

African Gold Rush Kills Children as Miners Discover Lead Dust
By Alan Katz - Dec 20, 2010 7:01 PM ET

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...

 

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Re: Lead poisoning kills over 400 children under five since March 2010 in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

UN urges Nigeria to prevent further lead poisoning after recent cases

Over 18,000 people have been affected and 200 children have reportedly died as a result of lead poisoning in Nigeria

7 January 2011 ? The United Nations has urged Nigeria to prevent further lead poisoning in the north and to implement measures to limit lead ore processing at sensitive sites, such as water sources which can easily become contaminated with the heavy metal.

In a new report completed late last month, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) also called for the cleaning up of contaminated villages as soon as possible to ensure that children suffering from lead poisoning can return to their villages for recovery and follow-up care after receiving treatment.

Abnormally high rates of death and illness among children have been recorded since the beginning of last year in Bukkuyum and Anka areas of Zamfara state in northern Nigeria.

Investigations by the Joint UNEP/OCHA Environment Unit revealed that the cause of the health problems is acute lead poisoning from the processing of lead-rich ore used in the gold extraction process in homes and compounds in the affected areas. More than 18,000 people have been affected and 200 children have reportedly died as a result of the poisoning.

The new report is based on the findings of a sampling and analysis mission requested by Nigeria?s Federal Ministry of Health in September. The mission was supported by four technical experts and used equipment from the Environmental Assessment Module (EAM), a mobile laboratory designed and assembled specifically for international deployment and provided by the Government of the Netherlands.

The mission focused on determining the quantities of lead in ground and surface water, building on previous investigations in Zamfara state. High levels of lead pollution were found in the soil, and mercury levels in the air were determined to be nearly 500 times the acceptable limit.

Investigators found that drinking water from wells did not meet the UN World Health Organization (WHO) and Nigerian standards for lead limits ? 10 micrograms per litre ? and that, in at least one case, the limit was exceeded by more than tenfold.

Water in ponds were often highly contaminated, according to the report, but no boreholes were found to have been contaminated, indicating that lead pollution most likely remains confined to areas where processing took place, and has not yet spread throughout the groundwater.

The soil in the four villages visited that have not been cleaned up was often highly polluted with lead, according to the report, which noted the tendency of young children to ingest soil as part of their normal hand-to-mouth behaviour exposed them to high concentrations of lead.

In the air, the levels of mercury were found to be nearly 500 times the
maximum exposure for non-industrial workers in the Netherlands.

The response to the contamination will involve medical care for the most severe cases of lead poisoning among children under the age of five, and decontamination of houses and villages, the report noted.

Both activities are needed because medical treatment alone is ineffective if children return home to contaminated homes and are re-exposed to lead.

Children over the age of five, as well as adults, who have been tested in the affected areas also have extremely high levels of lead in their blood and may require treatment.

The medical response is being lead by M?decins Sans Fronti?res (MSF Holland), with WHO and the UN Children?s Fund (UNICEF) supporting local authorities and the Nigerian Ministry of Health. The UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) has allocated $2 million in response to the crisis.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37219&Cr=Nigeria&Cr1=

 

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Re: Lead poisoning kills over 400 children under five since March 2010 in Nigeria?s northern Zamfara State

Source: http://www.dailytimes.com.ng/article/zamfara-village-cleared-lead-after-deadly-outbreak

Zamfara Village Cleared of Lead After Deadly Outbreak
Article | August 1, 2013 - 10:40am | By Agency Reports

Medical charity, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said Wednesday a Nigerian village that suffered an unprecedented and deadly lead poisoning outbreak had been cleared of the toxin, but that nearly 1,000 exposed children needed treatment...