FIRST, the illness took the animals. Goats fell silent and would not stand up. Chickens died in handfuls. Dogs disappeared.
Then the children succumbed. Toddlers stopped talking and their legs gave out. Women gave birth to stillborns. Infants withered and died. People feared that homes, or even whole families, were cursed.
The mysterious sickness killed 18 children in
Thiaroye Sur Mer, a town on the fringes of Dakar, Senegal's capital.
When television news aired parents' angry pleas for an investigation, when the doctors ordered more tests, when the West sent health experts – they did not find malaria or polio or Aids, or any of the diseases that kill the poor people of Africa. They found lead.
The dirt in Thiaroye Sur Mer is laced with lead, left over from years of extracting it from old car batteries. So when the price of lead quadrupled over five years, residents started digging up the earth to get at it. The World Health Organisation (WHO) says the area is still severely contaminated, even ten months after a government clean-up.
The tragedy of Thiaroye Sur Mer gives a glimpse at how the globalisation of a modern tool – the car battery – can wreak havoc in the developing world.
For years, the town's blacksmiths extracted lead from car batteries, and remoulded it into weights for fishing nets. It's a dangerous, messy process in which workers crack open the batteries with a hatchet and pull small pieces of lead out of skin-burning acid. The work left the dirt of Thiaroye dense with small lead particles.
Then the price of lead climbed, and traders from India came and asked about the dirt. They offered to buy bits of lead by the bag for 60 cents a kilogram, says Coumba Diaw, a middle-aged mother of two. So she dug up the dirt with a shovel and carried bags of it back to her house. She sat outside and separated out the lead with a sifter. It took just an hour of sifting to make what she did in a day of selling vegetables at the market. She kept her two daughters nearby as she worked. And women all over the neighbourhood did the same, creating dust clouds of lead.
Then the deaths came, over the five months from October 2007 through to March 2008. Demba Diaw's four-year-old daughter died. First she got a bad fever. Then she started vomiting. Mr Diaw, a 31-year-old teacher at an Islamic school, thought it was malaria and took her to the hospital. The next day she was dead.
"The doctors couldn't say what she died of," said Mr Diaw. His voice rises as he talks, and he spits out the words.
Mr Diaw started talking to other parents whose children had the same symptoms. They were spending more money each day for more lab tests, but not getting any answers. So he called the local media and held a news conference to demand an investigation. At about the same time, the hospital confirmed lead poisoning. The WHO was called in.
The government ran blood tests on relatives of the dead children. Their mothers and siblings were found to have lead levels of 1,000 micrograms per litre – just 100 micrograms per litre is enough to impair brain development in children.
One block away from Mr Diaw's house, the illness struck his niece, two-year-old Raminatou. Now that they knew what the problem was, they were able to save her.
The clean-up started in March, but was not extensive, residents say. On a side street in Thiaroye Sur Mer, a man points out a pile of sacks full of lead pellets that have sat against a wall for months through the rainy season. About 950 people have been continuously exposed to lead dust in the neighbourhood and many children show signs of neurological damage, according to WHO.
The government has stripped the top layer of dirt from the roads with earthmovers and is paying the hospital bills of anyone sickened by the lead. Authorities want to relocate the community. But Mrs Diaw says this is her only home.
And the Diaws are too poor and too rooted to move. So they will stay where the lead poisons the earth.
Death toll rises as labour laws and safety rules are floutedAS DEMAND for cars has increased, especially in China and India, so has demand for lead-acid car batteries.
About 70 per cent of the lead manufactured worldwide goes into car batteries, which are also used to power televisions and mobile phones in poorer areas.
Manufacturing and recycling of these batteries have moved mostly to third world countries.
Between 2005 and 2006, four waves of lead poisoning involving batteries were reported in China. And in the Vietnamese village of Dong Mai, lead smelting left 500 people with chronic illnesses and 25 children with brain damage before the government stopped it three years ago, according to the San Francisco-based environmental group OK International.
In richer countries, recycling of lead batteries is regulated. Most US states require anyone who sells lead-acid batteries to collect spent ones and ship them to recycling plants licensed and regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. Europe has similar oversight.
"It's when you get to third world countries where you don't have regulations or attempts to control the movement of this product that you see this kind of tragedy," said Maurice Desmarais, executive director of Battery Council International, a US-based trade group.
Manufacturing has moved to where labour is cheaper and environmental protection more leniently enforced.
