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	<img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Mozhgon-Rajaee-250pxl.jpg" style="width: 150px; height: 201px; float: right;" /><em>Mozhgon Rajaee is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in the Environmental Health Sciences Department. A graduate of Spring Arbor University, Mozhgon spent the summer of 2006 at Au Sable, studying at both the Great Lakes and Pacific Rim Campuses. She has been an Au Sable Graduate Fellow since 2008 and served as the UM student coordinator since 2010. As you&#39;ll read below, Mozhgon&#39;s research takes her to a small community in Ghana that relies heavily on gold extraction, often with few environmental safeguards for the mercury-intensive extraction process.</em></p>
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	The community I&rsquo;ve worked in for the past three years is small, inhabited by only about 2,500 people. The houses are simple and small, and surrounded by a flurry of noisy activity. The driving force behind the community is gold, which is deposited throughout the country. Homes are intimately mixed with mining equipment, making it impossible to live more than a few meters from some type of mining activity. The community, located in northeast Ghana, forces my western mind to think differently about work.&nbsp;</p>
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	As part of my research project, I spent about a week last August returning results of mercury concentrations in hair and urine samples and blood pressure collected during the summer of 2011 to two communities in northeast Ghana: A small-scale gold mining community and a comparison subsistence farming community. I then worked with a team on a return in April to discuss the issue of small-scale gold mining, water and health in Ghana and to do some follow-up research.&nbsp;</p>
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	<img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Sluicing.png" style="width: 300px; height: 225px; float: right;" />Small-scale gold mining is done globally and most of it utilizes mercury to isolate gold (with subtly different manifestations). It&rsquo;s a wonderfully efficient process, one that was used in the US until the 1960s. In small-scale gold mining, mined ore is ground up into a powder, mixed with water and sluiced (see right) on a slanted board lined with carpet. The carpet captures the heavy, denser particles&mdash;like gold. Drops of mercury are mixed with the gold-rich particles where they bind together into an amalgam. The gold-mercury amalgam is then burned with a torch, causing the volatile mercury to vaporize and leaving the precious gold behind. While efficient, the process is also terribly dangerous. In Ghana, workers are exposed to the vapor and often use no protective equipment. Since there is no separation between home and work space, gold-mercury amalgams can be burned only a handful of feet from where children are playing in their own yard.&nbsp;</p>
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	As many people know, mercury is hardly a safe chemical. Mercury is most widely known for its adverse neurological impacts, but can also affect behavior and the respiratory, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular and kidney systems. Mercury also has the disturbing characteristic that it can pass through the blood-brain and blood-placental barriers, meaning that it can travel to your brain and to the developing fetus (including its brain) to cause harm&mdash;this is what spurred the Evangelical Environmental Network&rsquo;s &ldquo;Mercury &amp; the Unborn&rdquo; campaign. Many symptoms are delayed, leading some to refer to mercury as a &ldquo;silent killer.&rdquo; If mercury caused these impacts immediately, few people would volunteer to use it&mdash;even for a profit like gold. &nbsp;</p>
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	Most of us in the U.S. are exposed to mercury as methylmercury (or organic mercury) through our fish consumption; evidence through fish advisories warning us of high mercury in certain species high on the food chain (Mercury has the ability to not only bioaccumulate in organisms, but also to biomagnify up the food chain). In the U.S., and Great Lakes region in particular, mercury is primarily released from the burning of coal, where it can deposit in bodies of water and be transformed by microorganisms to methyl mercury and be taken up by aquatic organisms. What makes these mining communities unique, however, is their exposure to elemental mercury vapor burned from the gold-mercury amalgams.&nbsp;</p>
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	<img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Kaylee_Hg.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 150px; float: right;" />My research was done with a team of students and translators, aiming to see how people living in the mining community are exposed to mercury and the effects of mining on lung function. This included interviewing people on demographics, medical and occupational histories, dietary habits and household characteristics. We measured blood pressure and lung function and took urine and hair samples to measure elemental and methyl mercury, respectively. In our return trip in August, we sought to educate people on their mercury results.&nbsp;</p>
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	Navigating the issue of education on mercury is a difficult issue. What do you say to a woman who is approximately six months pregnant, has a urinary mercury level that is known to pose serious health risks to adults, and burns gold-mercury amalgams? There are no easy answers, especially in an impoverished community. Most of the people we worked with have low levels of mercury in their hair and urine, but too many have levels that have been shown to cause adverse health effects. There are ways to reduce mercury exposure (mercury masks, retorts), but they&rsquo;re not readily used and often not sustainable. We cannot tell anyone what to do, but merely give them information as a means of empowerment. In a district where the literacy rate is just five percent, information is vital. Owing to high poverty and the prospect of income, it&rsquo;s difficult to know whether anyone will be able to change their usage of mercury for gold mining. Education at least provides a choice and a chance for a better quality of life.&nbsp;</p>
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	As an environmental health student, my research focuses on the human health effects of mining, but it&rsquo;s impossible to miss the environmental devastation, poverty and desperation that the gold market supports. Metals are literally the currency of all our lives. I seldom thought of their origin until college, and even then it was with a focus on their non-renewable nature. Like a scrape makes you aware of that forgotten skin on your knuckle, you cannot help but see an object differently once you know its origin. My perception of gold is much more polluted now than before any of this work.&nbsp;</p>
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	We all have grown up hearing about how money can destroy lives, but it&rsquo;s not just the greed of those in possession of it (or in want of it). The cost is incurred regardless of who pays it. I&rsquo;m often deeply troubled by some of these experiences, lamenting the injustices that go unnoticed by so many, in the name of progress, greed or even survival. I&rsquo;ve heard people in the mercury-research-world joke about the fact that mercury has absolutely no health benefits for anyone (many other metals have a health benefit up to a certain dose and become hazardous at higher doses, like iron and magnesium). Despite this, it&rsquo;s here on our earth, and its excessive use is evidence of our broken world. There are days when I let my anger over this overwhelm me, but I am encouraged by the beauty and intricacies that we&rsquo;re uncovering&mdash;like the element selenium that can help reduce mercury from accumulating in tissues. &nbsp;All in all, my work is an attempt to better understand our world and to see a better rendering of God&rsquo;s love through research, education and action.&nbsp;</p>
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	What to learn more about mercury and environmental health? &nbsp;Here are a few links&hellip;</p>
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	This is the link to Mozhgon&#39;s overall project, an &ldquo;Integrated Assessment of Water, Sustainability, Infrastructure Inequity, and Health in Small-Scale Gold mining Communities in Ghana&rdquo;: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/smallscaleminers/home&nbsp;</p>
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	EEN&rsquo;s &ldquo;Mercury &amp; the Unborn&rdquo;: http://creationcare.org/blog.php?blog=30</p>
