The boom also brought about a public health crisis. After miners filter out lighter materials, they use mercury to pull gold from the sandy slush, forming a blob of gold and mercury. They wash the gold by climbing into big buckets of mercury solution and jumping up and down, then vaporize the mercury with butane torches, fumes crawling around their faces. In addition to the risks to miners, alluvial gold mining each year dumps 30 to 40 tons of mercury, a potent neurotoxin, into the region’s rivers and atmosphere — the equivalent of about 6 million lethal doses. According to studies by the Carnegie Amazon Ecosystem Project, about two-thirds of fish sold in Puerto Maldonado contain mercury above acceptable doses, and about three-quarters of people in Madre de Dios have noticeable levels of mercury in their bodies.
http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/9/Peru-mining.html
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