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Trail:

To the Ends of the Earth

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My questionnaire of the Groote victims had shown that every person who had contracted this disease had eaten cycad at some stage of their lives. It was customary of Groote Aborigines to cleanse the cycad nuts of a natural poison by caging them into a fast flowing stream for one week or so. After detoxification, the nuts were later ground down to a flour for kneading into a kind of dough bread, which was actually baked in make shift ovens made of local soil - further manganese contamination!

Interestingly, the unusual custom of cycad consumption had been implicated as part of the cause of the Guam, Kii peninsular, West New Guinea clusters of neuro-degenerative diseases in the South Pacific. The native people of these regions had also eaten cycad as part of their staple diet.

The finger was initially pointed at a naturally occurring excitatory amino acid in cycads as the causal agent. But after exhaustive tests, this theory was dropped ; although feeding of the cycads to misfortunate laboratory animals DID produce neuro-degenerative disease. A secondary theory later developed which implicated the fact that the indigenous people of these regions had also been eating bats which had been feeding off the cycad fruit - in this way, the people were indirectly eating the toxic ingredient which the bats had failed to filter out for themselves; since bats have apparently adapted their metabolism to handle this poison. Interestingly, the results of my questionnaire had also indicated that the victims of Groote syndrome had all consumed bats and wallabies which also consumed the ‘uncleansed’ cycad nuts.

Considering that the Guam cluster areas also share the same high manganese, high aluminium, low magnesium/calcium with Groote Eylandt, I was beginning to wonder whether cycads simply serve as highly efficient bio concentrators of these metals, and it was the metal constitution of this fruit that represented the toxic problem all along - a problem which the early researchers had overlooked. So many avenues needed exploration.

After labelling up my samples, I went to bed.

A manganese dusted moon hung over the rainforest; If only for a moment, I felt the multiple moons of a lifetime merge, the timeless eternity to which Ernie Lalara had returned. 

That morning, Kandy came to pick me up from the Mission - a fair haired, determined lady who had previously served as the health and safety representative for the miners’ union, and had been emailing me for ages since my BBC film was shown on ABC Four Corners. Kandy had lived on Groote with her husband for twenty years, having done the hippy trail around the world back in the 1970s. Both of them were employed in the mines, and she had become concerned over health issues, particularly since her own blood tests had shown the classic high manganese and low magnesium ratio.

We drove off in Kandy’s most extraordinary antiquated car which resembled something of a cross between a car owned by a Coloradoan cowboy taxi company and that of a semi successful Brooklyn scrap dealer - squishy leather upholstered seating and an acutely hypersensitive suspension system which generated a kind of comical volley of vibrational bounces - reverberating like a shockwave for several seconds - every time the car passed over one of the many potholes on Groote’s un-metalled roads.

We arrived to meet a group of concerned white woman in the local hall of the mining village at Alyangula, many of whom had young children and were connected to the mine in some way.

This seemed a good opportunity for suggesting the potential importance of magnesium supplementation as a prevention against some forms of manganese intoxication - particularly appropriate for the healthy embryo genesis of any foetus conceived on this island. For when magnesium is low and manganese is high, manganese can substitute itself at the vacant magnesium sites on a raft of crucial enzymes with disastrous repercussions. Total inactivation of those enzymes will result.

One of the most disturbing consequences of the high manganese/low magnesium ratio in the growing embryo, lies with the fact that manganese can induce mutations in genetic material by substituting the magnesium activated ribosomal enzymes; thereby producing the genetic mutation underpinning Groote syndrome that is so widely seen in the Aboriginal community only ten miles away at Angurugu. Whilst Aboriginals are undoubtedly more susceptible to this specific mutation due to their genetic and local dietary customs (consumption of manganese rich yams, pandanus, crabs, etc), the offspring of the white sector of the mining community might also start to develop these types of mutation in the years to come. Remember how many years it took for some of the radioactive induced mutations to manifest as clinical conditions in the exposed communities?

Amazingly, the potential of high manganese exposure to induce mutations is ironically being exploited for positive uses in pharmacology; e.g. in the fight to suppress the AIDS syndrome, where manganese inactivates the magnesium activated enzyme, reverse transcriptase, once the manganese to magnesium ratio becomes too elevated in cells. This deprives the HIV agent of its ability to make multiple copies of itself; thereby severely suppressing the development of the AIDS disease process.

Kandy then took me up to the headquarters of the mine, where I had been scheduled for a tour of the operations followed by a meeting with the manager of the mine itself. One of the Union bosses then drove me around the different mine locations to view the techniques of open cast mining - felling the forest, blasting, stripping off the upper crust of laterites, mining the black manganese dioxide ore bed, backfilling, then replanting.

I must say that I was highly impressed with the results of the replanted rainforest after the mining operations had been completed. Indigenous saplings were being propagated, planted and maintained by Aboriginal labour until it was certain that the trees had taken root. Apart from the difference in the height of the trees, I was honestly unable to distinguish between the original blocks of rainforest and the blocks that had been replanted after extraction of the ore bed. It was overtly apparent that this mining corporation was not operating like some of the more sinister operators at work in South America and New Guinea.

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Last updated 09-Feb-2007