_{MSF decries inaction on Nigeria lead poisoning}

Abuja, 11 may – (ANA) - Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) decried on Friday a lack of action by Nigeria's government to tackle a lead poisoning epidemic that has killed 400 children and poisoned ten times as many near a gold mine. The ministers of mines, environment and health were scheduled to attend a two-day conference on the lead poisoning in northern Nigeria's remote Zamfara state organised by MSF ending on Thursday. None of them showed up. "This conference that we just spent a lot of money holding, they expressed their support for it, but none of the decision makers actually turned up," Ivan Gayton, the head of MSF Nigeria, told Reuters. "So the opportunity to announce concrete action was to some extent really missed." The ministers were not immediately available for comment. In 2010, a Nigerian health ministry official reported that lead poisoning caused by illegal gold mining had killed 163 Nigerians, most of them children, in remote villages, in the space of just a few months. Since then, the mining has continued and some 4,000 children of the miners, often from desperately poor backgrounds where other sources of income are meagre, have been contaminated. Miners return from work dusted with lead, which then pollutes their homes. Because the body struggles to rid itself of metal, it accumulates in the blood over time. Children are particularly vulnerable because their growing nervous systems can be permanently damaged. (ANA)

FA/ANA/11 May 2012-----------