Lead from car batteries poisons children in Senegal

[Guest guest]

Anybody see this? Horrific.

From dallasnews.com

Lead from car batteries poisons children in Senegalese town

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, January 4, 2009

The Associated Press

THIAROYE SUR MER, Senegal – First it took the animals. Goats fell

silent and refused to stand up. Chickens died in handfuls, then en

masse.

FILE 2008/The Associated Press

Ndep Tine stirs lead extracted from spent car batteries in Dakar,

Senegal. Then the little children started to wither and die.

The mysterious illness killed 18 children in this town on the fringes

of Dakar, Senegal's capital, before anyone in the outside world

investigated. But medical experts did not find malaria or polio or

AIDS, or any of the diseases that typically kill the poor of Africa.

They found lead.

The dirt here is laced with lead left over from years of extracting

it from old car batteries. So when the price of lead quadrupled over

five years, residents started digging up the earth to get at it. The

World Health Organization says the area is still severely

contaminated, 10 months after a government cleanup.

The tragedy of Thiaroye Sur Mer gives a glimpse at how the

globalization of a modern tool – the car battery – can wreak havoc in

the developing world.

As the demand for cars has increased, especially in China and India,

so has the demand for lead-acid car batteries. About 70 percent of

the lead manufactured worldwide goes into car batteries.

Manufacturing and recycling of these batteries have moved mostly to

the Third World. In 2005 and 2006, lead poisoning involving batteries

was reported in China. And in the Vietnamese village of Dong Mai,

lead smelting left 500 people with chronic illnesses and 25 children

with brain damage, according to San Francisco-based OK International,

which works on environmental standards for battery manufacturing.

Most U.S. states require anyone who sells lead-acid batteries to

collect spent ones and ship them to recycling plants licensed and

regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

For years, blacksmiths in Thiaroye Sur Mer extracted lead from car

batteries and remolded it into weights for fishing nets. It's a

dangerous, messy process in which workers crack open the batteries

with a hatchet and pull small pieces of lead out of skin-burning

acid. The work left the dirt of Thiaroye dense with small lead

particles.

When the price of lead climbed, traders from India offered to buy

bits of lead for 60 cents a kilogram (2.2 pounds), said Coumba Diaw,

a mother of two.

So she dug up dirt and sifted out the lead. It took an hour to make

what she did in a day of selling vegetables. She kept her two

daughters nearby as she worked.

Women all over the neighborhood did the same, creating dust clouds of

lead. Then the sicknesses started. The deaths came, one after

another, from October 2007 through March.

The Associated Press