Gold Boom Spreading Mercury As 15 Million Miners Exposed

As he clambered out of bed and onto his feet one morning late last year, Miguel Angel Cardona, 62, felt his body betray him. His head grew so heavy it pulled him tumbling back down.

“You feel fuzzy, like you’re drunk,” recalls the grandfather of nine, who’s spent most of his life in Segovia, a gold-mining town in northwestern Colombia. In the days that followed he noticed numbness in his hands and fingertips. He lost 12 pounds, no longer able to stomach the meat, rice and fried plantains his wife sent with him to work each day at a single-shaft mine on the edge of town. He worked with drums filled with mercury, water and crushed stone to process gold. Cardona suspected his job was poisoning him, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its May 28 issue.

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