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.