Lead poisoning in Senegal

Tragedy in a poor town
Straits Times 5 Jan 09;

First, it took the animals. Goats fell silent and refused to stand up. Street dogs disappeared. Then it took the children. Toddlers stopped talking and their legs gave out. Women gave birth to stillborns. Infants withered and died. Some people said the houses were cursed. Others said the families were cursed.

The mysterious illness killed 18 children in the town of Thiaroye Sur Mer on the fringes of Dakar, Senegal's capital, before anyone in the outside world noticed.

When they did - when the TV news aired parents' angry pleas for an investigation, when the doctors ordered more tests, when the West sent health experts - they did not find malaria, or polio or Aids, or any of the diseases that kill the poor of Africa. They found lead.

The dirt in this town of 100,000 is laced with lead left over from years of extracting the element from old car batteries. For years, the town's blacksmiths had been extracting the lead and remoulding it into weights for fishing nets.

It is 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.

Then the price of lead climbed, as the demand for cars and lead-acid car batteries increased, especially in China and India. And traders from India came and offered to buy bits of lead by the bag for 60 US cents (S$0.90) a kg, said Mrs Coumba Diaw, a mother of two.

So Mrs Diaw dug up the dirt with a shovel and carried bags of it back to her house. There, she separated the lead with a sifter. It took just an hour of sifting to make what she did in a day of selling vegetables at the market. She kept her two daughters nearby as she worked.

Women all over the neighbourhood did the same, creating dust clouds of lead.

Then the deaths came, one after another, over the five months from October 2007 through March last year.

Doctors at the local health clinic kept seeing the same symptoms with no response to treatment and started running more tests.

That was when Mrs Diaw's four-year-old daughter died. 'The doctors couldn't say what she died of,' said the father, Demba. He started talking to other parents. They were spending more money each day for more lab tests but not getting any answers. So he called the local media and held a news conference to demand an investigation.

At about the same time, the hospital confirmed lead poisoning. The government ran blood tests on relatives of the dead children. Their mothers and siblings were found to have lead levels of 1,000 micrograms per litre of blood. Just 100 micrograms per litre is enough to impair brain development in children.

The cleanup started in March last year, but was not extensive, residents say. About 950 people have been continuously exposed to lead dust in the neighbourhood, and many children show signs of neurological damage, according to the World Health Organisation.

In richer countries, recycling of lead batteries is regulated.

Most American 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. Europe has similar oversight.

Although North America and Europe continue to be the world's biggest buyers of cars, fewer and fewer car batteries are made there. Manufacturing has moved where labour is cheaper and environmental protection regulations are more lenient, or at least more leniently enforced.

The tragedy of Thiaroye Sur Mer gives a glimpse of how the globalisation of a modern tool - the car battery - can wreak havoc in the developing world.

'There's not a developing country where this isn't happening,' said Mr Perry Gottesfeld of San Francisco-based OK International, which works on environmental standards for battery production.

The WHO has said there is still so much lead in the ground in Thiaroye that the area is toxic. The government wants to relocate the entire neighbourhood. But, like many other families, the Diaws are too poor and too rooted to move. So they will stay where the lead poisons the earth.

ASSOCIATED PRESS