00:00Something deadly stirs in the brown depths of the Mekong,
00:03slowly poisoning people whose families have harvested its waters for generations.
00:08Doctors have found traces of arsenic and heavy metals in the body of Somdet Sintang,
00:12a fisher on Southeast Asia's longest river.
00:17They took my urine samples and even my fingernails and toenails for testing.
00:21They said they found it, this substance.
00:24But then they didn't say anything else.
00:26I just live my life normally.
00:27I've never been afraid or worried, but other villagers are worried.
00:30They don't eat fish. Some won't touch it at all. Won't buy it. Won't eat it.
00:35People living in this area on the Thai-Myanmar border used to buy fish from Somdet.
00:39But as news of the river's contamination spreads, he's seen his catch left as spoiled.
00:44In April, Thailand's pollution control authorities announced arsenic concentrations
00:49of almost 300 milligrams per kilogram of sediment sampled nearby.
00:53That's nine times what's considered dangerous for aquatic life.
00:57It's the first time this level has been found in the Mekong River's main stem,
01:01and researchers compare it to a ticking time bomb.
01:04The sediment is the highest.
01:06But now, they didn't emit to the water.
01:11But they're like a bomb.
01:14They can explode.
01:15They have the high steam or high folate of the water.
01:21They can explode and they can emit to the water.
01:24The Mekong provides a livelihood, directly or indirectly, to some 75 million people along
01:31its 4,300 kilometers, from its mouth in southern Vietnam, through Cambodia, and along the borders
01:38of Laos, Thailand and Myanmar, all the way to its source in China.
01:43The source of the contamination, however, appears to lie in war-torn Myanmar.
01:48There, economic turmoil has fueled unregulated mining.
01:52Rare-earth minerals from those mines are largely exported to China, where they feed global demand,
01:57with toxic runoff from their extraction believed to pose dangers to life downstream.
02:01Yeah, because heavy metal is, you know, long-term exports.
02:07If you have more accumulated, the end of this mostly is cancelled.
02:17Yeah, can destroy the nervous system in our body.
02:25Thais aren't content to watch their shared river deteriorate.
02:28The Intergovernmental Mekong River Commission, of which neither China nor Myanmar is a member,
02:34says it's strengthening regulation and monitoring.
02:37Meanwhile, protests, sometimes led by Buddhist monks, are breaking out.
02:42We marched from the headwaters to visit the communities upstream of the Kok River,
02:47and we didn't see children playing in the river anymore.
02:50We don't see birds. We don't see butterflies.
02:52The water is dead. And if the water is dead, what about the people?
02:56The people who rely on the river, often among Asia's poorest, are forced to make do.
03:04Our lives are entrusted to the Mekong River.
03:06We can't do anything else anyway.
03:08We have to live with this Mekong River.
03:10No matter what happens to it, we have to fish and find things to sell and eat right here.
03:16I entrust my life to this river.
03:18They say that the river is like life itself.
03:21Take this Mekong River.
03:22If it could cry, it would have cried by now.
03:24Local folklore says the Mekong River was carved ages ago by nagas,
03:29mythical serpent-like creatures competing for an unusually fat, juicy golden catfish.
03:35Today, heavy metal poisoning is making the river's fish unsafe to eat for the mortals along its banks.
03:41Howard Chang and Brent Thomas for Taiwan Plus.
03:43Have alaisиг
03:44Tinker
03:44An unatom
03:44An unatom
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