The world's gold fever is quietly poisoning Africa

A few years after arriving as a teenager to prospect for gold in Western Ghana, Yaw Ngoha had made enough cash to marry his sweetheart and build a house with a porch, to which he would later add a flat-screen TV and satellite dish. So when a town elder invited a doctor to town to warn miners about the hazards of wildcat mining nobody listened, said the 36-year-old, sitting on a wooden bench on his porch in a lush banana grove.