The Girlfriends: Spotlight, E10: Phyllis Saves the People from Poisoning

The Girlfriends: Untouchable - Season 4

iHeartPodcasts and Novel

True Crime, Relationships, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.2 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Phyllis Omido is just a few months into a new job, when her infant son starts to get sick. Fevers, dehydration, hospitalisation - Phyllis is scared. Then the doctors give her some shocking news: Her son has lead poisoning. The metal smelting plant where Phyllis works, just outside Mombassa, Kenya, is leeching toxic chemicals into the water of the nearby river. And her son isn’t the only one who’s unwell: she believes the factory is poisoning the whole community.

So Phyllis turns campaigner, and starts gathering stories from all over town. Children with skin burned off, babies dying in the womb, women with mysterious fatal illnesses… And she’s going to force her employer, and the Kenyan government, to pay attention. It’s a fight that will see her life threatened, and her dubbed ‘The Erin Brockovich of East Africa’.

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0:00.0	This is an I-Heart podcast.
0:04.0	On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in the woods
0:13.2	of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row. How does
0:19.2	someone prove that they deserve to live?
0:21.8	We are starting the recording now.
0:23.7	Please state your first and last name.
0:27.1	Krista Pike.
0:28.8	Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life,
0:32.2	on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:39.7	Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of
0:44.2	1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of
0:50.0	control. And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough.
0:55.4	And I didn't kill them. From Revisionous History, this is the Alabama murders.
1:01.5	Listen to Revisionous History, the Alabama murders on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
1:07.8	you get your podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight...
1:13.2	And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke.
1:17.8	A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old.
1:21.2	And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago.
1:25.7	How can a 101-year year old woman fall in love again?
1:32.8	Listen to heavyweight on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:39.8	When news broke earlier this year that baby KJ, a newborn in Philadelphia, had successfully received the world's first personalized gene editing treatment, it represented a milestone for both researchers and patients.
1:51.0	But there's a gripping tale of discovery behind this accomplishment and its creators.
	...

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