Battery boom drives Bangladesh lead poisoning epidemic

Junayed Akter is 18 years old but the toxic lead coursing through his veins has left him with the diminutive stature of someone several years younger. Akter is one of 35 million children — around 60 percent of all children in the South Asian nation — who are dangerously high levels of lead exposure.

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Junayed Akter is 12 years old but the toxic lead coursing through his veins has left him with the diminutive stature of someone several years younger. Akter is one of 35 million children around 60 percent of all children in the South Asian nation-who have dangerously high levels of lead exposure. The causes are varied, but his mother blames his maladies on a since-shuttered factory that hastily scrapped and recycled old vehicle batteries for profit, in the process poisoning the air and the earth of his small village. "It would start at night, and the whole area would be filled with smoke. You could smell this particular odour when you breathed," Bithi Akter told AFP.

"The fruit no longer grew during the season. One day, we even found two dead cows at my aunt's house." Medical tests showed Junayed's blood had twice the level of lead deemed by the World Health Organization to cause serious, and likely irreversible, mental impairment in young children. "From the second grade onward, he didn't want to listen to us anymore, he didn't want to go to school," Bithi said, as her son sat next to her while gazing blankly out at the courtyard of their home. "He cried all the time too."