Middle Eastern Pollution?Old & New
Toxins produced by the mines and smelters of thousands of years ago may be affecting the health of people living today in the Middle East. ?Even after 2000 years of dilution by environmental agencies such as wind, the heavy metals remain in high concentrations and continue to exert toxic effects on plants and animals including the humans who inhabit the area,? says F. Brian Pyatt of Nottingham Trent University in England.
Pyatt and his colleague J. P. Grattan researched ancient and current environmental pollution in an area called Wadi Faynan in southern Jordan. They measured current levels of copper and lead in the region where Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans and Byzantines worked large copper mines thousands of years ago.
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