Hunting for particles of gold in the jungles of Southeast Asia

The gold hunters of Myanmar sort themselves into two groups: kone-myaw means “washing on land,” which involves pit mining, and ye-myaw means “washing in the river.” The work is often seasonal. The job is migratory. Prospectors face all the usual environmental hazards of gold mining, principally exposure to mercury. A study in 2015 found that Burmese gold miners carried more than twice the background levels of mercury—the highly toxic heavy metal used to amalgamate gold—in their systems. It also warned that heavy metal pollution from gold mining is poisoning the waters and fish of rivers such as the Chindwin.
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