Daily Lessons from Life 29 September 2009

"Tue, Sep 29, 2009 Reuters - Cancer villages

ONE needs to look no further than the river that runs through Shangba to understand the extent of the heavy metals pollution that experts say has turned the hamlets in this region of southern China into cancer villages.


The river's flow ranges from murky white to a bright shade of orange and the waters are so viscous that they barely ripple in the breeze. In Shangba, the river brings death, not sustenance.

"All the fish died, even chickens and ducks that drank from the river died. If you put your leg in the water, you'll get rashes and a terrible itch," said He Shuncai, a 34-year-old rice farmer who has lived in Shangba all his life. "Last year alone, six people in our village died from cancer and they were in their 30s and 40s."


Every year, an estimated 460,000 people die prematurely in China due to exposure to air and water pollution, according to a 2007 World Bank study.

Yun Yaoshun's two granddaughters died at the ages of 12 and 18, succumbing to kidney and stomach cancer even though these types of cancers rarely affect children. The World Health Organisation has suggested that the high rate of such digestive cancers are due to the ingestion of polluted water.


The villagers use well water in Shangba for drinking but tests published by BioMed Central in July show that it contains excessive amounts of cadmium, a heavy metal that is a known carcinogen, as well as zinc which in large quantities can damage the liver and lead to cancer.

"China has many "cancer villages" and it is very likely that these increased cases of cancer are due to water pollution," said Edward Chan, an official with Greenpeace in southern China.


But it's not just water, the carcinogenic heavy metals are also entering the food chain. Mounds of tailings from mineral mining are discarded alongside paddy fields throughout the region.

"If you test this rice, it will be toxic but we eat it too, otherwise, we will starve," said He, the farmer, as he shovelled freshly milled rice into a sack. "Yes, we sell this rice too."

Across China, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of small, anonymous villages that are suffering the consequences of the country's rapid economic expansion, villages with rates and types of cancers that experts say can only be due to pollution. This may be the fate of more and more of China's population as mines and factories spew out tens of millions of tonnes of pollution every year, into the water system as well as the air, to produce the fruits of China's economic growth.


China does not have a comprehensive state health care system and more than 80% of farmers have no medical insurance at all, although there are plans for sweeping reforms so that by 2011, most of the population will have basic medical coverage.

The residents of so called cancer villages, meanwhile, struggle to fund their medical care, often going into debt to pay crippling pharmaceutical and doctors' bills."

Interestingly this news was put side-by-side with one that produced statistics to show how China has modernized from a farming country to a leading world industrial power! What irony!

Lessons for me are:

1. in the chase for wealth, there are winners and there are many more losers! The rich become powerful and the poor become dead! More poor dying is not a problem as the people in authority have to think about progress and the price paid of progress. Currently, progress take the pole. The price of progress comes later since it is not the people that mattered suffered!;

2. how do you balance this trade-off? A very tough question. From the perspective of the residents of the 'cancer villages', it is very clear. You simply have to stop the 'killing'! From the perspective of human life, the factories owners know that they have to STOP the 'killing', especially if their own lives were placed in the same fate as the 'cancer' villagers! From the authority that rule the land where the 'cancer' villages are located, the logic and facts are also very stark and straightforward - stop the 'killing'! YET. And YET, it goes on! The rice farmer said it best: we ate it and we also, by the way, sell it!!;

3. is it stupidity or what? fatalism? what will be will be? this is how it is and we cannot do anything about it! Well. If Obama can be the President of USA, the current world most powerful country in his short 50+ years old, China can change for the better in the next 60 years IF someone or, better yet, many more people become aware of the sanctity of life. That you SIMPLE CANNOT condone 'knowingly killing your own people' through the poisoning of the environment in which we all live in. Money has to be made. At the same time, money made must be wisely invested and lives saved!

May China progress for another 60 years so that we can see if the Chinese can live a prosperous life that they deserved, just like the Americans before them or the Romans before them or the whatever powers that existed before their civilization crashed under their own weight of excesses and greed!