World Report
Not all that glitters: mercury poisoning in Colombia
Researchers tracking mercury poisoning from artisanal gold mining in Colombia have found that
people in Antioquia have the world’s highest per head mercury pollution. Paul C Webster reports.
Segovia, a city of 44 000 people
in Colombia’s Antioquia province,
offers an unsettling pair of initial
impressions. First, there are the heavily
armed combat troops at the outskirts
of town, stationed here because
Segovia is one of Colombia’s busiest
gold refining centres, and guerrillas
and paramilitary groups raid here for
easy cash. The other initiation is more
insidious: it begins a few minutes after
arrival with an unfamiliar, metallic
taste on the tongue. Within an hour,
it has crept to the back of the throat.
After a couple of hours it is in the
lungs. This is the taste of airborne
mercury, a severe local environmental
and public health problem. Like the
combat troops, it, too, can be traced
to Segovia’s gold wealth, and the
violence it attracts.
The airborne mercury in Segovia
emanates from scores of small gold
mills, locally known as entables, where
gold-flecked rocks from nearby mines
are pulverised in rolling steel drums
containing mercury, which forms an
easily retrieved amalgam with gold.
Once the mercury-gold amalgam is
removed from the drums, it is heated
in small furnaces that vaporise the
mercury, producing semi-pure gold
while disseminating a powerful
airborne neurotoxin into the city’s
air. These health-threatening gold
production practices, which were
pioneered centuries ago but long-
abandoned by large-scale gold
companies, are used by an estimated
200 000 artisanal miners in Colombia,
and as many as 13 million others
in 70 nations worldwide.
Unlike in other parts of the world,
where highly-toxic artisanal gold
production is a largely rural industry,
the persistence of a low-level civil war
in Antioquia has driven gold producers
into crowded cities where they
www.thelancet.com Vol 379 April 14, 2012
have military protection. The result,
according to a team of researchers
from the UN Industrial Development
Organization (UNIDO), is a set of
serious community health risks cent-
ring 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
“‘...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...’”
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.”
The data supporting these warnings
are stark. Using two types of mobile
spectrometers to measure airborne
mercury levels, a technical team led by
Veiga tested air quality at hundreds of
sites in Antioquia including numerous
entables as well as street front shops
where gold is separated from mercury
in small furnaces. In many of the
entables and gold shops, mercury levels
were found to exceed WHO limits
by up to a thousand times. Airborne
mercury limits in residential areas in
the five cities studied were ten times
the WHO limits. In Segovia, mercury
levels 40 times WHO safety limits were
measured near an elementary school.
“Workers’ exposure at times approaches
fatal levels”, the UNIDO team reported,
while noting that even low levels of
exposure to mercury vapour can derive
“symptoms of fatigue, irritability,
loss of memory, vivid dreams, and
depression”. In studies of mercury
poisoning in Antioquia between 2007
and 2011, UNIDO found at least 30% of
almost 2000 people studied were highly
intoxicated—figures roughly similar
to those estimated by UNIDO in other
studies undertaken in gold mining
communities in Ghana, Tanzania, and
Zimbabwe.
Paul C Webster
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 World Report
Paul C Webster
In some parts of Segovia, UNIDO recorded mercury levels 40 times WHO’s limit
49-year-old Rauol Rios, a disabled
gold worker, says he believes his health
was permanently ruined by massive
mercury exposure 30 years ago. After
burning mercury-gold amalgam daily
for several years, in 1982 he succumbed
to severe trembling and was sent to the
regional referral hospital in Medellin,
Antioquia’s provincial capital. These
days, he says, he continues to be
plagued with kidney and prostate
problems, difficulty eating, and
impotence. And, perhaps because he
continues to live in an area surrounded
by gold producers that ventilate
mercury vapours, his blood levels of
mercury remain stubbornly high.
For the past 15 years, 36-year-old
Bryan Hernandez has purchased gold
amalgam in a shop in the centre of
Segovia’s bustling gold-processing
district. While customers wait, he
incinerates the amalgam in a small,
primitively filtered propane furnace,
and then weighs and buys the gold.
Hernandez, who is the father of
three young children, describes a set
of health complaints ranging from
constant chest infections to trembling
hands to internal bleeding. “It could
be the mercury”, he suggests. “There
are 16 gold shops ventilating mercury
vapours within a 100 metres from
here.” The UNIDO team, Hernandez
notes, is pushing gold producers to
install better filtration systems based
on technologies developed in Peru and
Ecuador that will prevent much of the
1380
mercury from being ventilated into
the community. Although Hernandez
himself has not yet been willing to
pay to install cleaner technologies,
some others have. New data from
Paul Cordy, a researcher who works
with Veiga at the University of British
Columbia, suggests UNIDO’s efforts
have reduced as much as 10% of
atmospheric mercury concentrations
in the past 16 months, despite a 30%
increase in gold production.
The UNIDO Colombia team is
urging for tighter government
control of mercury, removal of gold
processing facilities from urban
areas, and accelerated adoption of
cleaner technologies. In 2009, the UN
Environment Program began working
on a global legally binding treaty for
control of mercury—much of which is
produced in Algeria, Kyrgyzstan, and
China—with negotiations expected to
be concluded in 2013.
At Segovia’s main public clinic,
located in a cramped room above
an electronics shop in the town’s
riotously busy centre, resident doctor
Paula Gallo, says she is convinced
mercury pollution is a menace. “I see
many patients with shaking hands
and tiny signatures, which are classic
symptoms of mercury poisoning.
And there is also a disturbingly high
rate of depression and suicides here.”
But getting people in Segovia to take
precautions is not easy, says Gallo,
who has practised here for 4 years.
“There is strong local resistance to
taking blood samples. Everyone here
works in the gold industry. To a large
degree people just don’t want to know
the truth. I forbid pregnant patients to
work in the mines. But they continue.”
At the San Juan de Dios Hospital
in Segovia, general physician Martin
Diaz estimates that about 10% of
his patients show classic mercury-
poisoning symptoms including
shaking hands, fatigue, depression,
and suicidal thoughts. “There are
17 doctors working here. We all
frequently talk about the mercury
problem on a case–by-case basis”, he
explains. “But it is difficult to know
how much contamination patients
have. This is a primary-care facility
and we don’t have the capacity to do
routine tests.”
Aceneth Castillon, a nurse who
works alongside Diaz, says she believes
the mercury vapours are a “very
major problem”, which she firmly
associates with suicide. “Nothing is
being done about it”, she fumed. In
a conversation monitored by several
hospital administrators who claimed
lack of information because they
were recently appointed following
the election of a new governor in
Antioquia, Castillon cited data from
blood tests on 80 patients last year
revealing that more than a third
exceeded government health limits—
some by as much as thirty times. “The
problem seems to me to be getting
worse”, Castillon said.
At the Hospital San Vicente de Paul
in Remedios, a town of 9000 about
half an hour’s drive from Segovia,
Luis Eduardo Rojas, a 20-year veteran
doctor at the hospital, also said
he believes the mercury is linked
to heightened levels of violence,
depression, and suicide in the region.
Rojas complained that the only clues
about the health impacts come from
foreign studies, an assertion echoed
by hospital administrator Lenis Silva
Novoa, who said “this community is
frightened and wants action”.
At the Department of Antioquia’s
health ministry in Medillin,
Rosendo Orozco, director of toxi-
cology, says although the Government
of Antioquia suspended a health
surveillance programme in 2007, the
newly replaced regional government
is now moving to re-establish a
similar programme. “There was a large
increase in new [gold mining] licences
in recent years without environmental
control”, Orozco said. “The affected
municipalities are absolutely aware of
the health risks, but they are forced to
ignore them due to poverty.”
Paul C Webster
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