according to a team of researchers from the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), is a set of serious community health risks centring on neurological, lung, and kidney damage. After closely tracking artisanal practices in five cities in Antioquia over the past several years, the UNIDO investigators, who are financed by the Government of Antioquia Province as part of efforts to reform the artisanal gold industry, concluded in a recently published report that people here are exposed to the world's highest per head mercury pollution. Colombia as a whole, they believe, is the world's third largest consumer of mercury used in artisanal gold mining after China and Indonesia, and the world's highest per head polluter of mercury used in this type of industry. “The use of mercury in artisanal gold mining is a global problem that poses huge environmental and human health problems”, explains Marcello Veiga, a specialist on artisanal mining pollution from the University of British Colombia, in Vancouver, Canada, who works with UNIDO's mercury control efforts in Colombia, “but what we are seeing in cities in Antioquia is especially worrying, because it is largely an urban problem there. Mercury vapours are being released in the urban environment, intoxicating hundreds of thousands of neighbours of the gold processing centres and gold buyers.”
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)60582-0/fulltext?rss=yes
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