"Am I therefore become your enemy,because I TELL YOU THE TRUTH...?"
(Galatians 4:16)

ENVIRO WATCH:China "cancer village" pays ultimate price for growth

XIDITOU COUNTY,China (Reuters)-Once an isolated haven, the Chinese village of Liukuaizhuang is now a tainted hell, surrounded by scores of low-tech factories that are poisoning its water and air, and the health of many villagers.One in fifty people there and in a neighboring hamlet have been diagnosed with cancer over the last decade, local residents say, well over ten times the national rate given in a health ministry survey earlier this year.Many fear they are paying for the country's breathtaking economic expansion with their lives, as surrounding plants making rubber, chemicals and paints pour out health-damaging waste. "They asked in the hospital whether my family had a history of cancer. I said: 'No, in the last three generations no one had it'," one villager told Reuters, pulling out his x-rays and doctor's diagnosis that he had lung cancer. "It must have a lot to do with the pollution here."Three decades of reforms and opening up since 1978 have transformed China from a rigidly ideological backwater into the world's fourth largest economy, lifting millions out of poverty, but not without a price.Nationwide there are dozens of places like Liukuaizhuang, where factories have blackened streams, poisoned farmland and choked the air.Just 120 kilometers south of Beijing, Liukuaizhuang was a quiet village before the dramatic economic boom was kicked off by a series of low-key Communist reforms on Dec 18, 1978.Twenty years later almost 100 chemical plants were scattered across what used to be farmland and thirty years on someone in almost every family is dead or dying of cancer-the youngest just seven years old-according to a local activist. Officials agree that the area, dubbed a "cancer village" in domestic media, had a huge pollution problem, although they insist cancer rates are below the national average and all the worst-offending factories are now shuttered."The factories were not far from homes and to a certain degree influenced the normal life of the villagers," said the Communist Party spokesman for the county, Huo Junwei."(But) we think figures provided by individuals exaggerate pollution problems in our area," he said. "For several years we have been looking into whether there is a link between cancer and chemical production and have not yet got a scientific answer."
By Emma Graham-Harrison and Vivi Lin
To read more go to:
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSPEK9260120081211
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