"Lead from batteries poisons African town" by Heidi Vogt, Associated Press | January 4, 2009
THIAROYE SUR MER, Senegal - .... The mysterious illness killed 18 children in this town 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 didn't find malaria, or polio, or AIDS, or any of the diseases that kill the poor of Africa.
They found lead.
Now, I'm not minimizing the deaths or suffering one bit; however, with EVERYTHING GOING ON in Africa, this is the story that gets the most print today?
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, which are also used to power TVs and cellphones in some areas.
Both the manufacturing and the recycling of these batteries have moved mostly to the Third World....
Yeah, like EVERYTHING ELSE!
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Thiaroye Sur Mer is a town of 100,000 where yearly rains leave people wading through knee-deep water inside their cement-block houses.
Good Lord!
The ocean used to supply a livelihood, but fishing hasn't been good the past few years. Young men have increasingly taken to trying to sneak into Europe aboard large canoes with outboard motors.
Makes you wonder if the water hasn't been poisoned, too.
For years, the town's blacksmiths 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.
Then the price of lead climbed, and traders from India came and asked about the dirt. They offered to buy bits of lead by the bag for 60 cents a kilogram, says Coumba Diaw, a middle-aged mother of two.
So Diaw dug up the dirt with a shovel and carried bags of it back to her house. There, she sat outside and separated out 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 neighborhood did the same, creating dust clouds of lead.
Then the sicknesses started....
In richer countries, recycling of lead batteries is regulated. Most US 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.
Yeah, thank the stars we have the government protecting us here in Amerika -- you know, like the FDA!
--more--"
"Mugabe moving on new government
HARARE - President Robert Mugabe, who has held power since 1980, is moving to form a new government to end a months-long power vacuum, the official Herald newspaper reported yesterday. Zimbabwe's main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangira, has insisted that he will not become prime minister in a government of national unity until disagreements are settled. The two sides are divided on how to allocate Cabinet posts (AP)."
Yeah, no mention of the CHOLERA EPIDEMIC or the suffering of the Zimbabwean people. I guess that's only important when an agenda needs to be pushed.
"Insurgents take over police stations
MOGADISHU - Islamic insurgents appeared to be scrambling for power yesterday, taking over several police stations in the capital as Ethiopian troops who have been propping up the government began to pull out. Many fear even more chaos in the Horn of African nation (AP)."
Well, I can see why the MSM would want to minimize that failure of U.S. policy.
Of course, never mind the fact that Somalia is in a worse situation than Darfur.
And nothing about the PIRATES today?
