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Thursday, September 12, 2013

Peru: illegal gold mining causing mercury poisoning

Indigenous children in Peru’s southeastern Amazon, an area where tens of thousands of illegal gold miners operate, have unsafe mercury concentrations over three times the level of their non-native counterparts, a study has found.
The artisanal gold miners, who use mercury to extract the precious metal from river silt, dump more than 30 tonnes of the toxic metal in rivers and lakes in the Amazon region every year.

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