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Desmond D'Sa helped shut down a toxic landfill.

The landfill was located in South Durban – an industrialized city teeming with petrochemical plants, paper mills and oil refineries. D'Sa and his family had been forcibly relocated to the area by the apartheid government in the 1970s, together with thousands of other Indian and black South Africans. The apartheid government was notorious for forcing non-white laborers to live in the industrial areas where they worked.

In 2009, the landfill – which had operated for nearly 20 years – was looking to extend its lease. That's when D'Sa, the coordinator of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, began fighting back. Earlier this year, he was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for his efforts. We asked D'Sa about his quest to keep his community clean.

Why did you become an environmental activist?

In the early 1990s, I was working for the state oil corporation. I worked in a chemical plant, and I had done safety and risk [assessment], so I saw the damage to workers and that made me realize that the work we were doing was quite toxic and dangerous, and could affect our community as well.

At night I started to go to the [safety research] lab to get documents, and I would read up and try to understand what was going on [with hazardous waste disposal]. When I confronted management, they said, "We don't need people like you here." In 1998, I was fired while I was on holiday. That's when I began working full-time as an environmental activist. They unleashed a monster.

What was the key to your campaign against the landfill?

Carefully documenting everything. We brought in health experts and researchers from the Durban University of Technology and from the U.S. We got people in the community to write down the problems they were experiencing. We took photos and videos, and collected [water and air] samples and worked with researchers to analyze them.

Beyond that, the key is very simple: work all the time and talk a lot. Get up early in the morning, and get on the road. Talk to people, in communities and churches. Leave your cell phone on.

Was it difficult to get people's support?

During the apartheid era, the government placed toxic landfill sites in poor black communities – it was a common practice. It's only after [South Africa's first democratic elections in] 1994 that people realized they can stand up and fight.

There are a lot of people who are willing to help. They're in universities and communities. They're retired people. There are lots of people who are ready to pick up their backpack and say, "let's do this together."

You claim that a few years ago your house was set on fire because of your environmental activism. How did that affect your family life?

Even before the attack, my wife would sometimes say, "This community work, I don't want to see it at our home." Because people used to come by at all times of the day and night.

Then a few years ago, some assailants came and put a petrol bomb under our door. The fire came like a huge fireball, and I got burned trying to put it out. My daughter was affected by the smoke, and we both had to go to the hospital. My wife was traumatized – completely traumatized – and went to live with her parents. I had to put steel gates at the stairway leading to my house. I've never lived with gates in all my life. But my wife and I are still together. She's a strong person. And now she has moved back in with me.

What's the dump like now?

The dump used to be a clean nature valley. It's now a manmade mountain of waste that stinks every single day. There's an awful, rotten smell, sometimes you get the benzene smell, and you'll get a severe headache if you go near the site. There are houses right next to it.

The odors will continue for a few years until the site is properly remediated and closed off. But at least no new waste is going in, and the trucks that were passing through the community, often spilling stuff, are no longer there. And we're continuing to monitor the water and air quality.

What's next for you?

We're fighting against the expansion of the Durban port. Expanding the port will lead to displacement of the community, and inadvertently, ports bring in a lot of social ills like drugs and prostitution. Now we have stable communities and small businesses in the area, and all that will go if we [allow them to] develop the port.

There are also serious environmental concerns around the chameleon and the green frog as well as ecosystems that are unique to this area.

It's going to be a big fight.

Nadine Gordimer, a Nobel Prize-winning author famed for her portrayals of South Africa under apartheid, died Monday, her family said in a statement. She was 90.

Gordimer was considered a modern literary genius, an important chronicler of the injustices of racial segregation along with other white writers such as Athol Fugard and J.M. Coetzee.

"Her proudest days were not only when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991," her family said in the statement, "but also when she testified at the Delmas Trial in 1986, to contribute to saving the lives of 22 [African National Congress] members, all of them accused of treason."

Gordimer became active in the African National Congress — which was then banned but is now South Africa's ruling party — after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960s, in which dozens were killed. Three of Gordimer's books were banned during apartheid.

"They showed how people were living here," Gordimer said in an NPR interview last year. "They showed what influences were shaping our lives. And they showed the many different reactions to it among different people here."

Gordimer was one of the first people activist Nelson Mandela wanted to see upon his release from prison in 1990. A copy of her 1979 novel Burger's Daughter, which explored the family life of the children of revolutionaries, had been smuggled into his hands while he was imprisoned.

When they first met in the 1960s, she recalled in a 2009 interview, "We talked politics, of course. What else would we talk about?"

But she recalled in a New Yorker essay published upon Mandela's death last year that when they met a few days after his release from prison, he wanted to talk not about politics but his discovery that his wife had cheated on him.

This reflected in a way Gordimer's fiction, in which politics were always present but the personal was never forgotten. In 1981's July's People, a white family flees an armed rebellion, ending up increasingly reliant on a boy who had been their servant, turning the power relationship between white and black on its head.

As reviewer Maureen Corrigan noted of Gordimer's 2012 novel No Time Like the Present on NPR's Fresh Air, Gordimer's characters continued to grapple with politics after the end of apartheid, but found the country had become "much more morally ambiguous."

"Human beings must live in the world of ideas," Gordimer said in an interview with The Paris Review 35 years ago. "This dimension in the human psyche is very important."

Gordimer was born in 1923 in South Africa of immigrant Jewish parents, her mother English and her father a Lithuanian who had fled the pogroms of his home country. She began writing early and published her first short story when she was 15.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Germany midfielder Christoph Kramer's head injury in the World Cup final has revived concern about the way football deals with concussion.

Kramer continued playing for 14 minutes Sunday after taking a heavy blow to the face in a collision with Argentina defender Ezequiel Garay.

The 23-year-old Kramer was replaced in the 31st minute after slumping to the ground.

He appeared to be disorientated when helped off the field by medical staff.

Argentina players Javier Mascherano and Pablo Zabaleta played on in the semifinal against the Netherlands after sustaining head injuries. Both players started in the final.

Questions about FIFA's concussion protocol were first raised in the group stage when Uruguay defender Alvaro Pereira refused to leave the field after being struck in the head by an England opponent's knee.

CHICAGO (AP) — The song says a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, but a study says that kind of imprecise measurement can lead to potentially dangerous dosing mistakes.

The results, published online Monday in Pediatrics, underscore recommendations that droppers and syringes that measure in milliliters be used for liquid medicines — not spoons.

The study involved nearly 300 parents, mostly Hispanics, with children younger than 9 years old. The youngsters were treated for various illnesses at two New York City emergency rooms and sent home with prescriptions for liquid medicines, mostly antibiotics.

Parents were contacted afterward and asked by phone how they had measured the prescribed doses. They also brought their measuring devices to the researchers' offices to demonstrate doses they'd given their kids.

Parents who used spoonfuls "were 50% more likely to give their children incorrect doses than those who measured in more precise milliliter units," said Dr. Alan Mendelsohn, a co-author and associate professor at New York University's medical school.

Incorrect doses included giving too much and too little, which can both be dangerous, he said. Underdosing may not adequately treat an illness and can lead to medication-resistant infections, while overdoses may cause illness or side effects that can be life-threatening. The study doesn't include information on any ill effects from dosing mistakes.

Almost one-third of the parents gave the wrong dose and 1 in 6 used a kitchen spoon rather than a device like an oral syringe or dropper that lists doses in milliliters.

Less than half the prescriptions specified doses in milliliters. But even when they did, the medicine bottle label often listed doses in teaspoons. Parents often assume that means any similar-sized kitchen spoon, the authors said.

"Outreach to pharmacists and other health professionals is needed to promote the consistent use of milliliter units between prescriptions and bottle labels," the authors said.

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Online:

Pediatrics: http://www.pediatrics.org

FDA: http://tinyurl.com/oc3bnlk

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AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner