DR. COUNTER SAVES A VILLAGE both Ecuadorian and American doctors involved with medical intervention for these children. Dr. Counter met with doctors at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador and recruited them to join him in his effort to save the children of El Tejar from the heavy metal poisons. He and his Ecuadorian medical team took blood, urine, and hair samples from hundreds of children in the village and brought them back to America to be analyzed for their lead and mercury content. To their surprise, the samples showed the children to have lead and mercury levels that far exceeded those of children in the US or even adults who worked with lead and mercury. Many had potentially fatal levels of lead in their blood that required immediate medical intervention. Moreover, many of the nursing mothers were found to have toxic levels of lead in their breast milk. Dr. Counter then assembled an international medical team to investigate lead and mercury exposure among the indigenous populations in the Ecuadorian mountains and rainforest. In one village, where most of the women of child-bearing age work with lead extracted from car batteries to be used in the glazing of ceramics, he found a six year old girl with a blood lead level of 128 micrograms per deciliter of blood, which is more than 10 times higher than the Centers for Disease Control health risk threshold of 10 micrograms per deciliter. Such high levels of lead poisoning were astoundingly common in many children in her village. In another village, where gold mining with elemental mercury is widespread, he found a young Saraguro Indian boy with a blood mercury level of 89 micrograms per liter, which far exceeds the World Health Organization’s level of 10 micrograms per liter as a threshold of danger.
DR. Allen S. Counter
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