Gold Jewelry Tragedy In Nigeria Leads To Severe Lead Poisoning

Gold Jewelry may be beautiful, but digging up gold can be very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. In continents like Africa, which never really got out of the idol worship polytheistic “the gods are in control of everything and history has no direction” mentality, have never caught up with the rest of the world. They are, and have always been, people of the land. Make your living off the land, and that’s it. So much of the poor countries make their living off of what they can dig up from the earth. Gold is one of those things, and gold jewelry is what they sell. The problem is, in order to make gold jewelry, you have to first separate gold form gold ore. And usually, this ore contains lead, which you definitely don’t want as part of your gold jewelry, mostly since it is lethal.

But since countries like Nigeria rely on gold jewelry markets to make their living, they have to separate the ore, and with that comes lead into their soil, and from there, lead poisoning is not far behind. And so it happened that this year, 163 people were killed by lead poisoning in a village in Nigeria, after it had been discovered that lead made up 10,000 parts per per million in the soil. That’s 1% lead. That’s really, really high, and very, very deadly. The problem with the gold jewelry mining industry is that if it’s not regulated and it’s every family for itself, the lead has nowhere to go but down and into the drinking water. Aside from 163 people dying, thousands have been effected by the adverse effects of lead poisoning. And gold jewelry isn’t going to make them feel any better about it.

Right now, they’re simple taking the top soil and throwing it into plastic bags to shipped off and forever unbothered like nuclear waste. What will happen to the gold jewelry industry there remains unclear but it probably won’t end, since they have no way of making money and sustaining themselves. And even if the villagers know for now that gold ore can kill you if you don’t extract the gold safely, there probably won’t be much regulation, since African culture is a tribal culture, and governments don’t really know what they’re doing exactly. It is likely that the gold jewelry industry will be slightly more safe as individual families do what they can to protect themselves against lead poisoning, but a concerted effort to regulate the gold jewelry industry in any African country save South Africa seems far fetched.

And we can’t simply go in and build infrastructure for them. Western culture cannot be forced on African culture. Any initiative will have to be their own. All we can do is warn. So if you’re wearing any gold jewelry right now, appreciate it. Someone may have gone through much danger to get it to you from the Earth.

By: Fred Pollard

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Fred Pollard has a long experience in the Diamond, Gemstone, and Precious Metals industry and he is an expert in Gold Jewelry. Find out everything you need about fashion jewelry and the Jewelry Market through additional articles written by Fred.