In the first week of August, flash floods swept through more than 25 villages north of Atbara in Sudan’s River Nile state. The floods swept thousands of metric tons of mercury-contaminated mining residue into the Nile in a disaster that echoes the health and environmental threats that haunt communities in traditional gold mining areas across Sudan. A new briefing entitled How mercury is poisoning a nation by Mohamed Salah Abdelrahman for the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker (STPT), points out that “years of indiscriminate use of dangerous chemicals such as mercury, cyanide, and thiourea without protective measures for miners or local populations has exposed millions of citizens across Sudan to lethal risks”.