"From Lagos to Onitsha and Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s southern region suffers off-the-charts air pollution. Leaders are doing little to help."
"The fires burn constantly in and around Onitsha, a growing city nestled on the banks of the Niger River in southern Nigeria. Each fire is surrounded by its own hellscape of rotting food, mounded rubbish, castoff computers, and slaughterhouse scraps, and the blazes — often fueled with old tires sliced into ribbons — incinerate the city’s waste and send out noxious plumes of smoke laden with dangerously high levels of particulate pollution.
On the edge of one burn site, where a young boy watched as a laborer slaughtered a goat and tossed its carcass into the flames, a portable monitor recorded PM2.5 — the smallest and most dangerous form of particulate matter — at 999 micrograms per cubic meter of air, the upper limit the device could read and 40 times the World Health Organization’s guideline for an average 24-hour level of exposure. Fifty feet away, the meter still registered 283. None of the workers wore protective gear.
“This [particulate matter] is being inhaled into the lungs,” said Dr. Furo Green, a general surgeon and former chairman of the Nigerian Medical Association in the Rivers State of southern Nigeria. “Of course, it will find a way to the blood.” Later, he continued, “it will cause different issues in the body’s system, which can lead to cancers.”"
Anna Cunningham reports for Undark October 22, 2018 with visuals by Larry C. Price.
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