Evaluating Risks of Acquired Clinical Vulnerability Among Subjects Exposed to E-Waste - Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology - page 6

other elements are found in E-waste, but only in trace amounts. These include
americium, antimony, arsenic, barium, bismuth, boron, cobalt, europium, gallium,
germanium, gold, indium, lithium, manganese, nickel, niobium, palladium, plati-
num, rhodium, ruthenium, selenium, silver, tantalum, terbium, thorium, titanium,
vanadium, and yttrium (Electronic Waste 2009 ).

2.3 E-Waste Recycling in India

There are ive legitimate recycling units in India. These are located at Mumbai,
Bangalore, and Chennai. However, there are illegitimate E-waste scrap-yards, and
the cities that host major ones are Meerut, Firozabad, Chennai, Bangalore, and
Mumbai (Pinto 2008 ). Workers that are involved in the E-waste recycling are known
to use rather crude methods and are directly exposed to many chemicals as they
perform their work. The types of operations that are involved in illegitimate recy-
cling of E-waste include e-material collection, sorting, transportation, and disman-
tling. In addition, illegitimate workers may be involved in separation and recovery
of usable parts or precious metals (by acid leaching techniques) and open-air incin-
eration of unusable parts.
However, nonworkers also become exposed because they reside in areas adjacent
to locations in which E-waste is either disposed of, or is processed. Such sites
include landills, incineration sites, and illegal scrap processing operations. It is not
known how many such illegal E-waste processing operations exist, but it is known
that they pervade nearly all major cities in India (Pinto 2008 ).

3 Hazards to Human Health

In Table 4 , we summarize the health effects in humans that may result from expo-
sure to the chemical constituents in E-waste. The short-term clinical symptoms
resulting from E-waste exposure have been proiled; however, the problem of
chronic-exposure to low doses of multiple chemicals and the associated pathophysi-
ology (clinical vulnerability) associated with E-waste-exposed subjects remains
unaddressed.
There is a paucity of reports on the toxicoepidemiology of the subclinical effects
that result from E-waste exposure. A single citation exists from Guiyu, a town in the
Guangdong province of southern China. In Guiyu, both imported and domestic E-waste
is processed to extract valuable metals for sale or reuse. Huo et al. ( 2007 ) compared
the blood lead levels (BLLs) and blood cadmium levels (BCLs) of 154 children that
were less than 8 years of age from Guiyu, with 124 children of the same age from
Chendian, a town that had no E-waste processing industry. The proportion of the chil-
dren in Guiyu that had BLLs indicative of lead poisoning (70.8%) was far higher than
those of Chendian children (38.7%). BCLs of Guiyu children were also signiicantly
higher (20.1%) as compared to the 7.3% incidence for Chendian children.