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Rudnaya Pristan in the Primorye region was named one of the three Russian cities which are among the 10 most polluted places on Earth, according to a study held by a U.S. environmental institute.

According to the study results released by the Blacksmith Institute on Wednesday, Dalnegorsk and Rudnaya Pristan are two towns in the Russian Far East whose residents suffer from serious lead poisoning from an old smelter and the unsafe transport of lead concentrate from the local lead mining site.

The study suggests that drinking water, interior dust, and garden crops also likely contain dangerous levels of lead. Water discharged from the smelter averages 2900 m3/day with concentrations up to 100 kg of lead and 20 kg arsenic.

The report said that since 1930 there had not been any attempt to address associated health concerns by either an educational or a technical environmental program. The residents of the area were left to deal with their health risk problems on their own and are largely unaware of the risks, the study concluded. To add to the problem, some residents in Rudnaya use old casings of submarine batteries that were recycled by the smelter to collect precipitation for watering their gardens. According to Primorye’s regional statistics bureau, currently some 2,389 residents live in Rudnaya Pristan.

The other two Russian cities are Dzerzhinsk, a former Cold War-era center for making chemical weapons, located in the Nizhny Novgorod region, and Norilsk in the Krasnoyarsk region.

The other top world polluters are Chernobyl, Ukraine; Linfen, China; Haina, Dominican Republic; Ranipet, India; Mayluu-Suu, Kyrgyzstan; La Oroya, Peru; and Kabwe, Zambia.

More than 10 million people are at risk of lung infection, cancer and shortened life expectancy because they live in those cities, the report placed at http://www.blacksmithinstitute.org said.