Tens of thousands of people have fallen ill and seven have tied from shipping waste disposed of in Abidjan, an economic hub of the Ivory Coast with approximately four million residents. The latest figures reported show close to 40,000 people have visited a doctor in just a few days time as a result of the waste. Apparently more than 500 tons of highly toxic material was poured into fourteen city landfills. TerraDaily has an english translation of news about the crisis:

[Ivorian firm] Tommy is blamed for dumping the sludge — which has caused nausea, rashes, fainting, diarrhoea and headaches — onto ordinary Abidjan tips in August. [Dutch firm] Trafigura had planned to offload the oil sludge in Amsterdam in July but the Dutch authorities said they had refused to accept it because it was too toxic. The Dutch firm said it had finally offloaded the waste in Abidjan, on its way back from delivering a cargo of Estonian petrol to Nigeria, because the port was “one of the best equipped in west Africa” to treat it.

The Ivory Coast government resigned last week over the pollution scandal and seven people, including the heads of Tommy and two other local companies, have been arrested.

The health ministry announced on Wednesday it was recruiting 1,031 “young unemployed doctors, surgeons, dentists and chemists” to help cope with the flood of people seeking medical help.

Two Dutch environmental experts left on Monday to join the six French and three UN experts already in Abidjan and Switzerland is also planning to send help.

This incident is of such magnitude that it will surely impact the way toxic waste is regulated, and perhaps even how it is handled and disposed of, around the world.

Somethingawful has an interesting first-person account of a laptop that burst into flames at LAX:

So we’re waiting for a flight in the United lounge at LAX, the flight next to ours was heading to London and in the middle of final boarding, when suddenly this guy comes running the wrong way up the jetway, pushing other boarding passengers out of the way, he quickly drops his laptop on the floor and the thing immediately flares up like a giant firework for about 15 seconds, then catches fire. About a hundred other people in the lounge jumped up and began a mix of gawking and general panic, I clearly heard a few fleeing individuals saying something about terrorists.

No terrorists were involved, fortunately. It was just another poorly engineered device. One like the millions that have been recalled recently.

We know there are dangerous batteries in circulation. Will airport security do a battery check before you can board a plane now? Will they remove the on-flight power plugs to prevent people from overcharging? The link to your security is far more tangible to a box-cutter or bottle of shampoo, but since the perceived risk is so much less scary what are the chances the TSA will step in?

Finally, an employee came over with a fire extinguisher and put it out of its misery.

[…]

Also, we got to overhear some of the not-so-computer-literate people on our flight talking about how laptop batteries can explode if you “get too many viruses on your computer.” Christ.

Oh, wait a minute. Someone in the comments section has pointed out a news story that Virgin Arilines has told travellers to remove Apple and Dell batteries before the flight:

Virgin Atlantic has become the third airline to restrict the use of Apple and Dell laptop batteries on its flights. Passengers who want to take their Inspirons, Lattitudes, iBooks, PowerBooks, MacBooks or MacBook Pros onto the carrier’s planes are asked to remove the battery first.

Like Korean Air, which recently instituted its own battery ban, Virgin Atlantic isn’t preventing such notebook owners from operating their laptops, but it is limiting them to seat-side power supplies. Flying coach or economy without an in-seat power supply? Then you can’t use your Apple or Dell machine.

Interesting. You would think they would just shut off the power supply and force people to use batteries since the risk is from overcharging and not batteries alone, no?