World Financial Crisis Leads to Poisoned Nigerian Children

Gold in general has great PR. It’s slick, it’s hip, it’s bling. But in a remote corner of West Africa, it’s killing children.

Lead from illegal gold mines in northwestern Nigeria has sparked what Doctors Without Borders has called the worst case of environmental lead poisoning in years.

The catastrophe is part of the fallout from the collapse of the U.S. housing market.

OK, maybe this seems like a stretch — African kids dying because of bad loans — but here’s how it happened.

Gold has long been viewed as a financial safe haven. For years, it traded for a few hundred dollars an ounce and produced modest gains for investors. Then the U.S. housing bubble began to deflate in late 2006 and early 2007, sending Wall Street into a tailspinand setting off a global economic crisis that sent investors rushing to buy precious metals.

Gold prices shot up from $600 an ounce in 2006 to a record of nearly $1,900 an ounce in 2011. This prompted farmers in Nigeria’s Zamfara state to revisit some local rock outcroppings that supposedly held flecks of gold.

Unfortunately, that ground also held lethal amounts of lead. Miners hack tunnels into veins of quartz by hand. They smash the rocks with salvaged auto parts (axels are popular for bludgeoning) and then grind the ore into a powder in flour mills. It’s at this grinding stage that lead dust flies through the air and, eventually, makes its way into the blood streams of local children.

Read the rest at NPR