Africa’s child mining shame

Thousands of children like Adam work in Tanzania’s small-scale gold mines, some as young as 8. (Small-scale mines are also called “artisanal,” although the work is a far cry from the elevated craftsmanship that word implies.) Following more than 200 interviews and other research over the last year, Human Rights Watch has found that children risk serious injury and even death from the work.
Like Adam, they dig in deep, unstable pits for shifts of up to 24 hours. They haul and crush heavy bags of gold ore into powder. And they process gold using toxic mercury, handling it with their bare hands, as Adam told me he did from age 14, and breathing in fumes when it is burned. Mercury, which is particularly harmful to children, attacks the central nervous system and can cause tremors and twitching, memory loss, and irreversible brain damage as well as damage to the kidneys and the lungs. A doctor in Papua New Guinea who treated small-scale miners for mercury poisoning, described his patients staring blankly at the wall as like “zombies.”
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/10/africas-child-mining-shame/