Lead Poisoning

MSF is finally able to treat children in the village of Bagega now that a long-delayed program to remediate lead contamination is underway.

Human rights activists are pressuring the government of Nigeria to fulfill its promise to remediate lead contamination from gold mines in Zamfara District. MSF's Ivan Gayton warns that the delay is preventing treatment to hundreds of children.

This six-month progress report reviews the steps taken to achieve the Action Plan agreed by delegates at the International Conference on Lead Poisoning. It finds that on nearly all agreed action points, very little has materialized.

The Nigerian government has failed to release funds needed to remove lead from homes in a northern area of Nigeria, where hundreds of children have fallen ill or died from lead poisoning since 2010.

MSF is responding to one of the worst cases of environmental lead poisoning in recent history.

NPR's Jason Beaubien blogs about MSF's work to treat children poisoned by lead from gold mines in northwestern Nigeria.

The Nigerian government must commit significant resources to respond to a lead poisoning epidemic in Zamfara State, which has sickened thousands of children since 2010. 

Dallas-based nurse Kaci Hickox began working with MSF in 2007. Last March, she was sent to Nigeria to be the Doctors Without Border/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) emergency medical team leader following outbreaks of measles and meningitis. Two months later, however, she found herself in the middle of the organization’s first-ever response to lead poisoning and an international effort to assist the Nigerian authorities that came to include the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

This past summer, a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) team conducting measles surveillance in Nigeria followed a rumor to a remote village where 40 children had died of a mysterious illness, and more were falling ill.

As many as 400 children have died of lead poisoning-related illnesses in Nigeria since March, two international aid groups say, and as many as 30,000 people could be affected by lead contamination.The deaths occurred predominantly in children under the age of 5 in the state of Zamfara, according to Lauren Cooney, the emergency manager for Medecins Sans Frontieres. The group is also known by its English name, Doctors without Borders.