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“Many women end up losing their children,” says Alessandra Korap, a community leader of the Munduruku people from the Brazilian Amazon.
“Either they can’t get pregnant, or they lose their [foetus] over time.
“So, women are afraid of getting pregnant.”
For centuries, the indigenous Munduruku have lived in an area across what is now the states of Amazonas and Para in northern Brazil, especially around the Tapajos River.
But in recent decades, villagers had been plagued by curious symptoms that they didn’t realise could be related: children unable to lift their heads, adults unable to walk any more, muscle tremors, memory loss, fading hearing and vision, miscarriages.
Now they are finally closing in on the cause.
The Tapajos river, their lifeblood, is laced with highly toxic mercury.
Mercury poisoning is hard to diagnose because symptoms resemble other degenerative illnesses like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, says Gabriela Arrifano, professor of mercury toxicology at the Federal University of Para.
“But there is now enough evidence to relate the signs and symptoms found in people exposed to mercury.”
And they have no doubts about where it’s coming from.
“We have robust evidence that mercury emissions to the environment comes from illegal gold mining activity,” says Prof Arrifano in her university lab, where she analyses hair and blood samples.
When researchers began studying the symptoms, Alessandra “didn’t know what mercury was”, she says.
Alessandra Korap says mercury is damaging Munduruku women’s fertility
Hand in hand with drugs
In Brazil, gold mining is outlawed in indigenous territory.
Yet swathes of it are pockmarked with red and orange craters from illicit gold projects – a trend…
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