Ghana’s Minister of Lands and Natural Resources at the time, John Peter Amewu, told a forum in Accra in October 2017 that a study had linked cases of dementia in Ghana to mercury from illegal mining, known as galamsey. Illegal miners use mercury to extract gold, and much of it ends up in rivers and soil.
According to the minister, about 10,000 Ghanaians live with dementia, a brain condition that causes gradual memory loss, and some of them had been exposed to mercury. He used the finding to call for public support for the fight against galamsey, stressing that the government opposes harmful mining methods, not mining itself.
The study was not named, and the minister acknowledged that the reliability of the data had not yet been established, so the link should be treated with caution until the research is published.
This is a summary of a report by Graphic Online. Read the original report on Graphic Online.
