There is so much that can be said about the environmental devastation found in most of the Africa. This article describes the town of Kabwe in Zambia. Strip mining for lead and smelting with no environmental oversight has left this miserable corner of a miserable part of the world so polluted that just surviving there is a challenge. How sad is it that a mother notices stomach pains and vomiting in her children and the first thing she considers is HIV? Only later does she realize that its actually lead causing the physical illness. Lead levels in soil are 100X the recommended exposure limits here in the US and blood lead levels in children are higher than 45mcg/dL (in the US we get alarmed if a kid’s lead level is greater than 4mcg/dL. There is some remediation being performed, and the Zambian government is spending a whopping 1.7 million USD on this. My guess is it’s gonna take a lot more than that. By the way – Mr Richard Feder from Fort Lee says New Jersey is a beautiful state. It’s the Garden State as a matter of fact. A lots changed since the ’70s.
Young men look for metal at the site of an abandoned lead mine in Kabwe, Zambia. Lead poisoning of children in the area is endemic.
