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It was not easy for 36-year-old Surtini Paputungan to leave Buyat village in North Sulawesi, the place she had been born and grew up in. But with her three children suffering from strange illnesses, ranging from lumps and rashes to headaches and seizures, she knew they had to move.

Over the past several years, a number of reports claimed that a raft of strange illnesses suffered by villagers in the area were the result of PT Newmont Minahasa Raya, a major gold miner in the area, began releasing their mining tailings into Buyat Bay.

But a new study released over the weekend by a panel of local and overseas experts found that no contamination threatening to human health or the environment was found in the bay.

Speaking to the Jakarta Globe during a recent interview in Jakarta, Surtini said her family’s troubles started in 1996, around the same time Newmont began releasing the tailings from their gold mine into Buyat Bay, where she and her husband, both fishers, derived their livelihood.

Surtini said she remembered being overcome by nausea and frequent vomiting when pregnant with her third child.

“My husband took me to the hospital but we didn’t get any answers about what was happening to me. The doctor said to my husband that he had to chose between me or our baby, because both of us had a slim chance to live,” she said. “My husband refused to hear this and just brought me home and treated us with simple medication.”

Both mother and child survived, but her daughter was born with white blisters on her lips, which Surtini described as “like they had acid poured over them.”

“It turned out that my neighbors were having the same symptoms, not just my family,” she added.

By 2005, however, after years of mysterious illnesses, the couple decided to pack their bags and move the entire family to Dominanga village, six to seven hours journey by land.

“Buyat is my birthplace, the place where my mother was also born, but I had to move for the safety of my children and family,” Surtini said.

“I miss it a lot, but now my kids are much more healthy in the new village. They still have headaches but they go away with medicine. In Buyat, when they got headaches and took some medicine, instead of getting better, they got even worse.”

The research by the independent scientific panel, established under a so-called goodwill agreement between the government and the subsidiary of US mining giant Newmont, examined all aspects of the water in the bay, including chemical and biological measurements. It determined that toxic arsenic and mercury levels were well within national and international standards.

The panel, which was made up of experts from Manado State University, Sam Ratulangi University, the University of Indonesia and from Australia and the United States, also compared the heavy metal content of fish caught in the area with those from other coastal areas, and found the levels to be safe.

Environmental activists, however, are wary of the study’s claims. “If there’s no contamination, then how would you explain lots of people getting sick in that area? Is there any explanation from the panel for that situation?” said Raja Siregar, author of “Uncovering Buyat,” a book published in 2006 on the matter.

“There are still lots of questions that need to be answered. Which areas did they examine? How high is the marine biodiversity level now? What was the impact on the drinking water? How do these people consume their water?” he added. “We cannot close the case even though they say there has been no harm.”

Furthermore, Raja said that to properly determine contamination levels, the panel should also consider the effect on the biodiversity of the area and examine the whole spectrum of heavy metal content.

“They would need to conduct acute and chronic toxin tests to determine the levels, and not just partial but the whole of the tailings,” he said. “They also need to closely check the marine biodiversity levels there, is it low or high, not just check seawater levels. A simple way would be to just breed fish in the tailing-affected areas and see if there are changes.”

In 2004, the State Ministry for the Environment conducted its own research into the area’s seawater, rivers, groundwater and drinking water. It checked the heavy metal content in fish and other marine life.

The ministry’s integrated research team consisted of relevant government agencies and environmental groups. Its study concluded that Buyat Bay had been contaminated by arsenic.

As a result of the 2004 findings, the ministry filed a lawsuit against the miner but lost the case in 2007 in a decision upheld by the Supreme Court in 2009.

However, Raja, who was involved in the ministry’s research team, said a different independent study conducted by a university concurred with the 2004 report that the area’s groundwater had been contaminated by arsenic.

“That team did not specifically deal with the 2004 research, but it discovered that arsenic and mercury levels were quite high in people’s wells,” he said.

David Sompie, site manager for Newmont, said the latest research had been entirely independent and the miner was providing $30 million over the next ten years to continue to monitor the impact of the tailings.

“In addition, the symptoms that you mentioned do not indicate a link between the source and the patient,” he said.