The quickest way to separate gold from rock, Sadio Camara says, is with a drop of mercury. She empties a dime-size packet of the silvery liquid into a plastic bucket of muddy sediment outside her home in southeastern Senegal. With bare hands and no mask, she swirls the mixture as her children look on. "I know mercury isn't good for your health—that's why I don't drink the water it comes into contact with," she said. "I only process small amounts of gold, so there's no danger." Across West Africa, mercury—a potent neurotoxin—remains the dominant method for extracting gold from ore in the region's booming informal mining sector, much of it illegal and unregulated.
In artisanal mining, mercury is prized for its ability to bind quickly and easily to gold. Miners mix the liquid metal into crushed ore, and the mixture is then heated—often over open flames—to evaporate the mercury and leave behind a lump of gold. The process is cheap and effective, but even small-scale exposure can carry serious risks. In Senegal's gold-rich Kedougou region, women like Camara use the metal regularly, often without protection, to make a living. Mercury exposure can cause irreversible brain damage, developmental delays, tremors, and loss of vision, hearing, and coordination. A 2018 Duke University-led study found mercury levels in soils, sediments, and water near artisanal gold-mining villages in southeastern Senegal that exceeded safety thresholds set by the World Health Organization and the US EPA by 10 to 100 times.
"Women are much more exposed than men," said Modou Goumbala, the monitoring and evaluation manager at La Lumiere, an NGO that supports community development in southeastern Senegal. That exposure can be especially dangerous for pregnant and nursing women. So why take the risk? Because gold pays. In Senegal, gold processors like Camara typically process between 5 grams and 10 grams of gold per month, earning the equivalent of $370 to $745—more than double the national average salary of about $200. "The easiest way to earn money today is gold mining," Camara said. "Subsistence agriculture will not provide you enough for food or other needs." More here, including what Senegal's government is trying to do about the issue.
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