Doctors treat 50 children after suspected leak from Russian dump

VOLOKOLAMSK: Doctors in a Russian town where residents have protested over gas leaks from a local dump, treated dozens of children complaining of dizziness and nausea Wednesday, officials said.
Riot police were called into Volokolamsk, some 120km west of the Russian capital, earlier in the month to break up a demonstration calling for the closure of the landfill.
Local officials said the day before the demonstration that a gas leak from the site led to double the usual levels of hydrogen sulphide and nitric oxide in the air.
Doctors treated 50 children from different schools in the town, the Moscow regional authority said in a statement.
"The main complaints were nausea and dizziness," it said, adding that experts were not linking the cases to the Yadrovo landfill.
But the statement added that Moscow governor Andrei Vorobyov had earlier said reforming the region's landfill system would be one of his priorities.
Around 200 people had gathered outside the Volokolamsk hospital Wednesday, an AFP journalist said.
One person was holding a sign reading: "We are suffocating! We so want to live you know."
"Don't kill our kids," another placard read.
Yekaterina Volkova, deputy head of the local education department, told the TASS state news agency she believed the cause of the dizziness outbreak was the Yadrovo landfill. — AFP