A few years ago I happened to be reading a study related to teenage behaviours and HIV prevalence and came across a finding that really jolted me. In the parish of St Ann, 16 per cent of male adolescents reported having contemplated or attempted suicide.

John Maxwell

I commented on this in one of my columns, making the point that this statistic was particularly surprising because St Ann was the parish with the longest history of bauxite mining - where the economic benefits might be best expected to raise the general level of well-being.
Teenagers do contemplate suicide but nearly one in five seems extreme.

A prevalence of 16 in 100 means that in an average class of 50 boys, eight would have contemplated or attempted killing themselves. If eight in 50 boys contracted mumps it would be regarded as an epidemic. When they try to kill themselves, however, nobody takes any notice.

Originally I theorised that perhaps the emotional problems were caused by disruptions, relocations and the housing crises caused by bauxite mining. Now, I am beginning to wonder if there isn't a more sinister explanation - that it is bauxite mining and processing that may be driving our children crazy.
Jamaican children, living nearer to aluminum pollution than most others, are more exposed to aluminum in the environment, absorbing it in their drinking water, in their food, through their skins and their lungs.

Bauxite as Poison

Aluminum or aluminium is the third most abundant element on earth and the most abundant metal. It is found in almost every soil. In certain countries, mainly tropical, rain and temperature have, over the millennia, converted some forms of limestone into soil. One of these soils is known as bauxite, a form of clay in which aluminum is more abundant than in any other, usually mixed with iron, titanium and other minerals.

Many minerals are important to human metabolism, helping enzymes do their work in various physical processes. Aluminum, however is not one of them; on the contrary, aluminum is implicated in a wide range of physical and mental disorders.

Thousands of acres of mined out lands have been despoiled and laid waste while successive commissioners of mines and the Jamaica Bauxite Institute have looked the other way, unconcerned with enforcing the law.

For some reason the poisonous nature of aluminum is not very publicly known, a fact which may be the result of excellent public relations work by the aluminum and food and drug industries. Aluminum is a major ingredient in antacids, in baking powders, in water treatment. It is also the material of which most cooking utensils are made.

According to leading authorities on the subject, including Dr Richard Yokel of the University of Kentucky School of Pharmacology, aluminum is a very potent neurotoxicant poisoning the brain and nervous system. It is not only poisonous to human brains, but is also a major problem in agriculture where it reduces soil fertility. Aluminum is leached from the soil by rain and into water supplies where it has led to the extinction of fish in several environments.

In humans, excess aluminum causes encephalopathy - degeneration of brain tissue; osteomalacia - softening of the bones and anemia - "tired blood".
Many things about aluminium are not as well known as they should be, among them one uncontested fact: acidic foods like cabbage, tomato and citrus fruit should not be cooked or stored in aluminum. In experiments it has been shown that the juice of acidic cabbage, after cooking in aluminum, has aluminum content as high as 20 grams per litre - which qualifies it as a highly significant adulterant. The total body burden of aluminum in healthy human subjects is approximately 30-50 mg, which means that the acidified cabbage water contains 2,000 times as much aluminum as is normally found in a healthy human body.

In animal and human studies, aluminum ingestion is implicated in neurological disease symptoms comparable with those of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinsonism, damaged immune systems, and reduced life expectancy, physical weakness and stunting.

The first "International Conference on Metals and the Brain" was held as recently as seven years ago, in Padua, Italy. The scientists - neurologists, nephrologists, pharmacologists, paediatricians, neuroscientists and other experts in medicine and health from all over the world proposed recommendations to limit the ingestion of aluminum by human beings. One factor they could not deal with, of course, is limiting aluminum dust in the atmosphere.

Where Ignorance Is Death

When licences were first issued for bauxite mining, the British colonial government didn't think to charge reasonable royalties to companies given licence to bully landowners, disrupt community structures, tear down forests and to do a great deal that was inimical to Jamaica, its people and its landscape. Bauxite was red dirt and the thing to do with dirt is to get rid of it.

The one condition meant to protect the environment was the requirement that 'mined-out' lands should have their topsoil restored. Apart from the fact that even the restored lands are of poor productive quality, a great deal of them have never been restored and are in fact desert places, wounds in the flesh of the Jamaican landscape. And while the mining companies destroyed forests and built roads which allowed the illegal harvesting of trees, the dust created by mining also destroyed forest trees and damaged the fertility of surrounding farmland.

Presumably, no one understood quite what it was that we were about to lose. For more than 50 years, the Department of Mines and Geology has allowed the bauxite companies to get away with ignoring the only public interest imperative. Thousands of acres of mined out lands have been despoiled and laid waste while successive commissioners of mines and the Jamaica Bauxite Institute have looked the other way, unconcerned with enforcing the law.

Apart from this trifling misprision of felony, Jamaica has not bothered much about the industry that was for years the 'flagship' of our so-called development.
Sometimes it seemed that the aluminum companies wanted us to pay them for the onerous task of removing our bauxite.

There is no centre for the study of bauxite in Jamaica outside of the Jamaica Bauxite Institute, whose sentiments seem to be entirely on the side of the exploiters. We have no school of bauxite research to examine the economic, social, public health and other costs and benefits of the industry, no programme to investigate the bauxite-caused problems of ordinary people who for 50 years have been complaining that their health, their farm animals, their crops and their houses have been ravaged by the industry.

Yet, in the world outside of Jamaica - which lives much less intimately with bauxite and alumina - people have for years been pursuing research into the bad effects of aluminum on human and other forms of life.
The one Jamaican exception of which I am aware is a study done several years ago by Dr Petra Charles-Williams, a public health investigation to which I have referred in previous columns.

There is a great deal of evidence to implicate aluminum and bauxite in serious damage to human health, particularly to the human brain. It is possible that the aluminum companies are so big and powerful that they scare off all but the most intrepid researchers.

Despite this possibility, there is solid evidence to implicate aluminum in damage to the human brain and nervous system, most notably in Alzheimer's Disease - a formerly rare syndrome, which has rapidly become so epidemic in the western world as to almost be fashionable. Increasingly, results show that aluminum accumulates in the brain tissue of workers in the aluminum industries.

'Endemic' Violence

Forty years ago, Rachel Carson complained in her book, Silent Spring, that we were creating new chemical compounds at the rate of tens of thousands every year, in a world which had taken millions of years to adapt to the chemicals already present in our environment. Writing about our unrelenting war on insects, Carson said, "Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides but biocides. .the chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire".

Carson predicted that scientists would be altering the human germ plasm not only by design, but en passant, as it were: ". many chemicals, like radiation, bring about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray."

Rachel Carson was right. Public health workers and scientists in the United States and elsewhere are becoming increasingly alarmed by a phenomenon called 'premature puberty' in which children as young as five and six years old are becoming sexually mature - able to have babies when they are not much more than babies themselves. Most of these kids are from the Caribbean and Central America, victims of mosquito and cockroach sprays - insecticides made from chemicals which mimic human hormones or switch on human hormones before time.

Some of us know that Michael J Fox's Parkinson's Disease is caused by over-exposure to insecticide. And we know about premature puberty. What we don't know is whether the endemic violence in Jamaica may not have its roots in the dust and fumes created by bauxite mining and processing.

Professor Richard Yokel reports that high levels of aluminum were found in analysis of the hair of several 12 to 18 year-old boys with severe emotional problems and in the hair of a two-year-old with severe emotional problems. These patients lived near an aluminum processing plant. Professor Yokel also states that routine analysis of hair for trace metal content showed unexpectedly high concentrations of aluminum in patients with severe neurologic and other disorders.

Other studies indicate that the ingestion of aluminum can result in increased deposition of aluminum in the brain and cause related changes in memory and learning ability. Citrus products increase the absorption of aluminum by the human body, and in Jamaica, citrus grows on bauxite land.

Another fascinating piece of evidence is that calcium deficiency increases retention of aluminum in human cells and studies of hyperkinetic and hyperactive children clearly indicate that low calcium levels frequently accompany high aluminum levels. In a lactose intolerant population such as ours, it occurred to me, it may be possible to reduce the crime rate simply by adding calcium to our children's diet or removing them from proximity to the dust and smoke of bauxite and alumina processes and warning them away from citrus fruit and juices if they can't relocate.

Relocating the population, of course, would mean abandoning most of Jamaica west of Guy's Hill - including the Cockpit Country - to the delight of the aluminum companies and the Jamaica Bauxite Institute.
There are people in Jamaica who will accuse people like me of being anti-development because we believe that we should certainly look our gift horses in the mouth, because, as they say elsewhere, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".

In poor communities such as ours, where acidic tomato ketchup is slathered on everything and everything is cooked in aluminum pans, it may seem like nitpicking to wonder whether we are not digging our graves with our teeth. If that doesn't kill us, we seem to want to ensure that we die of premature senile dementia after inhaling aluminum along with the mother's milk of pro-'development' propaganda.

The water supplies of Kingston, and most of southern Jamaica, are already contaminated by bauxite waste - three million tons of red mud annually, left to poison the soil and the water with aluminum, sodium, arsenic and assorted heavy metals.

If it is true - as the evidence suggests - that prolonged exposure to aluminum can cause physical and neurological harm to women, the foetuses in their wombs, can stunt babies, drive children and teenagers crazy and accelerate senile dementia, I believe we have cause to be concerned about the blessings of bauxite. The playboys and playgirls of the western world advise us to accept 'development' - to welcome any arbitrary capitalist with enough money to buy love; and to go with the flow toward 'take-off'.

These characters are no different from the cargo-cultists of Truk and Kwajalein in the South Pacific. During the last World War they saw American troops build runways on the islands which thereafter were magically supplied with food and other cargo. Runways were 'the thing' the islanders thought, so they built any number of them, imagining that the magical cargo would continue to arrive in perpetuity.

But we are supposed to be more sophisticated. We have institutions like JAMPRO, the UDC, the Department of Mines and Geology and the Jamaica Bauxite Institute.
So why aren't we rich, and more important, why are so many of our children killing themselves and their fellows?

It seems to me that Jamaica urgently needs to examine its relationship with bauxite. The real question is whether we can afford bauxite. We need to seriously apprise ourselves about the lethal and sub-lethal effects of bauxite and to discover just how dangerous this silent killer is to our environmental health and to our human health and prospects for survival. I think we need to begin those studies now. We have no time to lose.

Copyright©2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

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