At Least 1,300 Chinese Children Lead-Poisoned In Hunan Province By Unlicensed Smelter - New Event

[hatrack]

BEIJING — Lead pollution from a newly opened and unlicensed manganese smelter has poisoned more than 1,300 children in southeastern China’s Hunan Province, state-run media said on Thursday, the second incident of mass lead poisoning in the past month.

Officials in Wenping, 970 miles south of Beijing, shut down the smelter, the Wugang Fine-Processed Manganese Smelting Factory, last week and detained two of its owners after about a thousand local residents protested the poisoning, the English-language state newspaper China Daily reported. The plant’s general manager remains at large.

Tests since then have found elevated levels of lead in the blood of 1,354 children, or about 7 in 10 children who were examined, the official news agency, Xinhua, reported. The severity of the poisoning cannot be measured without further testing; 17 of the 83 children who received those tests have been hospitalized. Lead poisoning damages the nervous and reproductive systems and can permanently cripple children’s growth and intellectual development.

The report of poisoning in Wugang followed a similar incident in Shaanxi province, in north-central China, where state news reports say 851 children living near the nation’s fourth-largest smelter have tested positive for lead poisoning since early August. More than 170 have since been hospitalized.

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/world/asia/21china.html?_r=1&hp

[GliderGuider]

1. I, for one, welcome our new Han overlords... /nt

[hatrack]

2. If they keep this up, they won't have the collective functioning neurons to rule the world . .

Setting aside the question of why anybody would want the gig.