Pollution Hospitalizes Hundreds in China: Lead poisoning from smelter

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT/AP: Pollution Hospitalizes Hundreds in China
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 6, 2006
Filed at 10:47 a.m. ET

BEIJING (AP) -- Hundreds of people in northwestern China have been hospitalized with lead poisoning that was likely caused by pollution from a nearby smelter, state media and local officials said Wednesday.

The poisonings in two villages in poverty-stricken Gansu province added to a string of recent pollution disasters in China that have prompted violent protests in some areas.

The first sign of trouble in the villages of Xinsi and Moba came on Aug. 18, when medical tests showed 10 people had high levels of lead in their blood, the Beijing Daily Messenger reported.

Health officials conducted checkups and ''discovered that almost every family in the villages had the same kind of problem,'' or at least 879 residents, the newspaper said. The youngest victim was 5 months old....

***

Environmental protection has become a prominent issue in China following a number of industrial accidents in the past year in which major rivers have been poisoned, forcing several cities to shut down their water systems....

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-China-Lead-Poisoning.html

[Warpy]

1. China is also losing agricultural land

due to water pollution, something it simply can't afford with its large and still growing population.

They're going to have to come to grips with polluters, and I imagine their laws will be even stricter than ours.

[w4rma]

3. Unless the ruling class see this as population control.

I bet just like our ruling class, theirs considers most of these lower class folks as undesirable.

[Warpy]

4. Agriculture in China is labor intensive

so if they kill off the peasants, they don't eat.

There is a great deal of unrest there now, as peasants haven't shared in the economic boom (sound familiar?) and now their land and their water is being poisoned.

Either they deal with this one or they face an uprising that will forever tarnish them in the eyes of their people, something they really can't afford at this stage.

[w4rma]

5. A ruling class that believes their own propaganda doesn't think logically

And there is no way around this. A ruling class *will* believe their own propaganda eventually.

China has strict information control. It has no free press. The ruling class worries that if the middle-class urban dwellers found out about this, and believed it, they could be ousted. The ruling class might not even believe this themselves and might just think that it's just another bunch of rebels trying to stir things up and must be put down.

Urban dwellers and rural dwellers aren't allowed to intermingle in China. Their national identification cards either give them access to the cities or exclude them from the cities.

[noonwitch]

2. Most of our inner cities have serious lead poisoning problems

In Detroit, there are neighborhoods where the lead is in the dirt around the houses. The people who live there probably don't even know about it until their kid tests positive for lead. There is an old lead smelt on Nevada, near the prisons and the precinct, that put lead into the whole area, even into the suburbs.

Then there are all the rental houses with old, peeling paint that the city doesn't have the resources to crack down on the owners.

Lead poisoning is one of those things that really pisses me off. It shouldn't happen in this country-we've known about it for decades. It seriously affects kids' academic abilities.

[kurth]

6. Just the tip of the iceberg

of what's really happening in China.