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The Hidden Cost of Gold: Birth Defects and Brain Damage
CIDAHU, Indonesia — Thousands of children with crippling birth defects. Half a million people poisoned. A toxic chemical found in the food supply. Accusations of a government cover-up and police officers on the take.
This is the legacy of Indonesia's mercury trade, a business intertwined with the lucrative and illegal production of gold.
More than a hundred nations have joined a global campaign to reduce the international trade in mercury, an element so toxic there is "no known safe level of exposure," according to health experts.
But that effort has backfired in Indonesia, where illicit backyard manufacturers have sprung up to supply wildcat miners and replace mercury that was previously imported from abroad. Now, Indonesia produces so much black-market mercury that it has become a major global supplier, surreptitiously shipping thousands of tons to other parts of the world.
Much of the mercury is destined for use in gold mining in Africa and Asia, passing through hubs such as Dubai and Singapore, according to court records — and the trade has deadly consequences.
"It is a public health crisis," said Yuyun Ismawati, a co-founder of an Indonesian environmental group, Nexus3 Foundation, and a recipient of the 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize. She has called for a worldwide ban on using mercury in gold mining.
Mercury can be highly dangerous as it accumulates up the food chain, causing a wide range of disorders, including birth defects, neurological problems and even death.
Today, despite the risks, small-scale miners using mercury operate in about 80 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. They produce up to 25 percent of all gold sold.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday November 11 2019, @08:48AM (1 child)
When I was a kid in the 70s, our physics teacher had a big bowl full of mercury, and had us plunge our hands in it to feel its density. And she did a bunch of experiments with it on the lab bench with us kids gathered around and staring closely at the strange stuff. All she told us was to avoid getting any in our mouthes, and avoid breaking mercury-filled thermometers, because it "wasn't terribly healthy".
Now you break a CFL bulb in your house and you need FEMA to change your carpeting.
It's probably right to treat mercury as the dangerous stuff that it is. It's just amazing how our perception of it went from casual to full nuclear-style hysteria.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday November 11 2019, @06:40PM
On a related note, Sir Isaac Newton drunk quicksilver and managed to a respectable 84 - about twice the life expectation. He did went crazy at old age or so some say.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.