Lost history · 2009-2010
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In a handful of Zamfara villages, children began having fits and dying. Families thought it was malaria. It was the dust from the gold their parents were processing in the yard.
In early 2010, in remote villages of Anka and Bukkuyum local governments in Zamfara, small children were getting sick and dying in numbers that made no sense. Many were under five. They had stomach pains, they vomited, and many had convulsions. Families assumed it was malaria, which is what it usually is.
Médecins Sans Frontières, the medical charity, noticed the rising deaths and told the Zamfara State health ministry during March and April. When MSF tested blood from the children, it found something nobody expected: very high levels of lead.
The villages were mining gold. Not in big company pits, but by hand. People dug out rock, carried it home, and broke, ground and dried it inside their own family compounds to get at the gold. The trouble was that this ore was also rich in lead. Every round of grinding threw fine lead dust into the air and onto the ground, right where the children ate, slept and played.
The government's chief epidemiologist, Dr Henry Akpan, told Reuters in June 2010 that officials had first become aware of the problem in March. By then 355 cases had been reported in at least six places, and 163 people had died, 111 of them children. He put the death rate among cases at 46 percent. One of the villages named was Dareta.
In May 2010 Nigeria's Federal Ministry of Health pulled together a team: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Nigeria's field epidemiology programme, the World Health Organization and MSF. On 16 May they began going house to house in two affected villages with questionnaires, taking blood from young children and sampling the soil.
The numbers they brought back are hard to read. Between 23 May and 4 June they surveyed 119 family compounds. In the year since May 2009, 118 of the 463 under-fives living in those compounds had died. That is more than one child in four. Most of those deaths, 82 percent, had happened in the previous six months, and parents said 82 percent of the children who died had convulsions first, a sign of severe lead poisoning.
Every single one of the 205 living children they tested had lead poisoning. And 97 percent were above the level at which doctors start treatment to pull lead out of the body. Readings ran from 33 to 445 micrograms per decilitre. For comparison, WHO noted that levels as low as 10 are linked to harm to a young child's developing brain. CDC described the levels as unprecedented.
Two thirds of households said they processed ore inside the compound, and three quarters had only started in the last year. Lead in the soil and dust reached more than 100,000 parts per million. The US limit for places where children play is 400. In 85 percent of the compounds, the soil was over that limit. WHO later confirmed heavy contamination in five more villages, including Abare and Sunke in Anka and Tungar-guru in Bukkuyum, and found more than 90 percent of sampled children there with dangerous lead levels.
There is a cruel catch with lead. You can give a child medicine that pulls lead out of the blood, but if you send them back to a yard full of lead dust, they simply take it in again. So treatment and clean-up had to go together.
MSF began giving children oral chelation therapy, the treatment that binds lead so the body can get rid of it. By 13 July 2010 it had treated 166 children in a local hospital. Most responded well. In many, the fits stopped within a day of starting treatment.
On 8 June, workers started removing contaminated soil from two villages. A US environmental team, sent by the Blacksmith Institute, had come in to assess the damage. The response also included health messages for families and attempts to control the mining itself.
It was not a clean ending. When a UN mission later went back to Dareta, which had already been cleaned up, it still found high lead and mercury levels in some homes, a sign that some people had gone back to processing ore. In other villages, wells and ponds carried lead, and soil readings reached as high as 60,000 parts per million. The pull of the gold was strong, and the people doing this work were poor.
Years of work did eventually change things. By 2022, MSF said conditions had improved a great deal after its long-running lead poisoning programme in the state.
What makes this story so hard is how ordinary the danger looked. No explosion, no spill. Just parents trying to earn money, at home, where they could keep an eye on their children.
