Africa
Mercury in Senegal mines endangers families
The quickest way to separate gold from rock, Sadio Camara says, is with a drop of mercury. In Senegal’s Kedougou Region, far from the capital Dakar and near the borders with Guinea and Mali, she and dozens of other women spent the day washing piles of sediment in search of gold. In front of her house a short walk away, she emptied a dime-sized packet of the silvery liquid into a plastic bucket of that sediment.
With bare hands and no mask, she swirls the mixture as her children watch. “I know it’s dangerous, because when we go to exchange the gold and they heat it again, those guys wear masks to avoid the smoke,” she says. But she says since she only processes a little gold at a time, she believes she is safe. But even small-scale exposure can carry serious risks.
Across West Africa, mercury — a potent neurotoxin — remains the dominant method for extracting gold from ore in the region’s booming informal mining sector, much of it illegal and unregulated. In Senegal’s gold-rich Kedougou region, women like Camara use the metal regularly, often without protective gloves and masks, to make a living. Mercury exposure can cause irreversible brain damage, developmental delays, tremors, and loss of vision, hearing and coordination.
Once released, it spreads easily through air, water and soil. Particularly after heavy rains, it contaminates rivers, poisons fish and accumulates up the food chain. “We are doing this because of ignorance and lack of means,” Camara says as her son played at her feet in the courtyard of her family’s home. “If the government know what is good for us, come and show us.” In artisanal mining, mercury is prized for its ability to bind quickly and easily to gold. Inside her kitchen hut not far from the stream, Camara heats a nugget of mercury-laced sediment with a metal spoon over an open flame. The toxic metal evaporates and leaves behind a kernel of gold.
There’s no mask, no gloves – just the raw materials and her bare hands. Her children stand just a few feet away, watching and breathing the fumes. The process is cheap, effective and dangerous. Camara said she doesn’t usually handle the burning herself – that task is typically left to men. But she and other women regularly mix and shape the mercury amalgam with no protection. “If you stabbed yourself with a knife it wounds you, if mercury did the same, people wouldn’t touch it. But with mercury you can go years without feeling the effects.
The consequences come later,” says Doudou Dramé, president of an organization that advocates for safer conditions for gold miners in Kedougou. Women are also particularly vulnerable, says Modou Goumbala, the monitoring and evaluation manager at La Lumiere, an NGO that supports community development in southeastern Senegal. He says the mercury being used to separate the gold from the earth ends up in the region’s waterways, which women interact with a lot more than men in Senegalese society. “Women do the laundry with water, women do the dishes. Women wash the children. And women often use the waterways for this, not having sources of safe drinking water,” he says. That exposure can be especially dangerous for pregnant and nursing women. Mercury can cross the placenta, putting fetuses at risk of developmental delays and birth defects. Infants may also absorb the toxin through contaminated breast milk.
Gold can be extracted from earth without using mercury, using gravity separation, often achieved with machines like shaking tables. In 2020, the Senegalese government promised to build 400 mercury-free gold processing units, but so far only one has been constructed. During a recent visit, the rusting slab of metal sat unused beneath a corrugated roof. The machine is in Bantaco, 15 miles from Camara’s home, and it isn’t practical for most miners to use because of the logistical challenge of transporting ore there and back to where they are from. Goumbala says one machine per village would come closer to solving the problem.
Jen Marraccino is the senior development director at Pure Earth, an NGO that works to fight against mercury and lead poisoning, particularly in artisanal small-scale gold mining. She says that gravitational separation is a technology that can provide miners a way to get gold without endangering their health. “The more that this type of work happens in a particular region, the costs then go down for these technologies such as shaking tables. Building the supply chains to the international market, the costs go down. So, solutions can build and grow within a region,” she says.
AP’s repeated efforts to schedule an interview with Senegal’s director of artisanal and small-scale mining were unsuccessful. The director later said the department had been suspended. He did not provide a reason.
The official death toll in South Africa’s devastating floods remains unclear as rescue efforts for missing people continue in the Eastern Cape province.
Authorities said last week that 101 people had died but this number is likely to increase.
Victims include 38 children. The youngest fatality is an infant about 12 months old. Seven bodies remain unidentified and search operations are ongoing for two missing children.
The OR Tambo and Amathole districts were the hardest hit areas.
“This moment will be recorded among the most agonising chapters in our province’s history”, Eastern Cape provincial government official Zolile Williams said in a statement.
“While we have borne witness to tragedies that claimed the lives of our people before, this one resonates on a profoundly deeper level, it wounds the very foundation of our hearts.”
The Eastern Cape provincial government extended its condolences to the victims’ families.
Extreme weather hit the province between June 9 and 10. Heavy rain caused by a cold front turned into floods that swept away victims and their houses, trapped others in their homes, strongly damaged infrastructure and cut electricity supplies.
Electricity has been restored to over 80% of affected customers and more than 95% of the water supply having been restored in the OR Tambo and Amathole Districts, according to Williams.
Local authorities said an estimated R5.1 billion (about $290 million) would be needed to repair damaged infrastructure.
South Africa has declared a state of national disaster, allowing the government to release funding for relief services.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the worst affected sites on 13 June and blamed the heavy rains and catastrophic floods on climate change.
Climatic phenomena, such as the El Niño phase, caused “a series of extreme weather events” on the African continent last year, the World Meteorological Organization found in its 2024 State of the Climate in Africa report.
Another cold front hit South Africa’s Western Cape province last week, bringing days of rain and causing flooding in and around the city of Cape Town.
Donald Trump’s decision to drastically cut US humanitarian aid is expected to have disastrous consequences, researchers warn.
In a study published by the prestigious scientific journal “The Lancet,” they estimate that the collapse of US funding for international aid could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030.
According to their modeling, the 83% cut in US funding—a figure announced by the government in early 2025—could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, or about 700,000 additional child deaths per year.
Examining data from 133 countries, the international team of researchers estimated that USAID-funded programs prevented 91 million deaths in low- and middle-income countries between 2001 and 2021.
USAID-supported programs led to a 15% reduction in overall deaths, with a 32% decline in loss of life among children under 5, researchers found.
The biggest impact was seen in preventable diseases: HIV/AIDS mortality dropped by 74%, malaria by 53%, and neglected tropical diseases by 51% in countries receiving the most aid, compared to those with little or no USAID funding.
Chadian opposition leader and former Prime Minister Succès Masra, who has been in detention since mid-May, has ended his hunger strike after about a week of fasting, his lawyers announced Monday.
” President Masra, physically weakened but morally combative […] is suspending his food strike and will re-prepare for the rest of this procedure,” the group of lawyers defending him announced in a statement Monday evening.
” His doctor, who was able to visit his bedside and consult with him, strongly recommended that he suspend this difficult and painful decision, especially since the medication he must take requires it,” the statement read.
On Saturday, around twenty women from his opposition party, the Transformateurs, demonstrated in their undergarments in N’Djamena to demand the release of their leader.
Masra, arrested on May 16, announced his hunger strike last Tuesday in a letter made public by his lawyers. He is being prosecuted for ” incitement to hatred and revolt, formation and complicity of armed gangs, complicity in murder, arson, and desecration of graves .”
On May 14, 42 people, ” mostly women and children,” were killed in Mandakao, in the Logone-Occidental region (southwest Chad), according to the Chadian justice system, which accuses Masra of having provoked this massacre through one of his public statements.
Success Masra, originally from the south of the country, enjoys widespread popularity among the predominantly Christian and southern populations, who feel marginalized by the predominantly Muslim regime in N’Djamena.
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