The number of Chinese children found with excess lead in their blood near a metal plant in central China’s Hunan Province has surpassed 1,300, state media said yesterday, with new clashes between police and parents over pollution.
The Xinhua news agency said 1,354 children who lived near a manganese processing plant in Wenping Township were diagnosed as having excessive lead in their blood.
It said more tests had to be done by provincial authorities, but that the children, aged under 14, had lead levels of more than 100mg per liter of blood, compared with the normal level of zero to 100mg.
A China Daily report had said that nearly 100 of 600 children being tested near the Wugang plant had lead poisoning.
A man who would not give his name or position at the Wenping township government office said 60 percent to 70 percent of the local children tested were found to have excessive levels of lead in their blood.
He said he could not give a number of cases because they were still on the rise, with more children being sent to the hospital for testing. Calls to local health offices rang unanswered yesterday.
Xinhua said local authorities ordered the smelter shut last week and detained two of its executives on suspicion of “causing severe environment pollution.”
In Shaanxi Province, at least 615 out of 731 children in two villages near the Dongling smelter in the town of Changqing have tested positive for lead poisoning, which can damage the nervous and reproductive systems and cause high blood pressure and memory loss.
In the Hunan case, the children were from four villages near the Wugang Manganese Smelting Plant in Wenping, Xinhua said. The children still had to be tested in the provincial capital Changsha to see how serious their cases are.
Xinhua quoted Huang Wenbin, deputy environment chief in Wugang, as saying the plant opened in May last year without the approval of the local environmental protection bureau.
Parents and residents around the Wugang plant in Wenping Town, Hunan, voiced fear and anger about the threat to children who have studied at schools hundreds of meters from the site.
“We used to recruit several hundred children every year but parents have stopped sending their children here this summer,” a kindergarten teacher there told Xinhua. “Who knows, maybe our classrooms will all be empty when the new term begins next month.”
The Chinese government has become increasingly worried about the environmental and health costs of pollution, and also about rising public anger about the problem.
The latest rash of cases could sow more fear.
At Wenping, about 1,000 villagers blocked a road and flipped over a police car on the night of Aug. 8 during a protest against toxins from the manganese smelter, the China Daily said.
Western Hunan is rich with metals and has many strongly polluting smelters.
“Mass incidents” — or riots and protests — sparked by environmental problems have been rising at a rate of 30 percent per year, Chinese environmental Protection Minister Zhou Shengxian (周生賢).
The Wugang manganese smelter has been shut down while two of its executives have been detained by police, Xinhua said.
Earlier this week, state media reported that protesters had broken into a smelting works they blamed for the lead poisoning of hundreds of children in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, smashing trucks and tearing down fences.
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