Another reason to avoid buying Chinese goods

I will never be accused of being a rabid environmentalist. However, I do believe pollution is a serious problem which must be controlled. I am not talking about the hysteria over carbon emissions. I am talking about real cancer causing pollutants. These chemicals are what environmentalists need to focus on. The Chinese, in their mad dash to flood the global economy with cheap and poorly made goods, failed to consider environmental impacts. They are paying a heavy price.

China "cancer village" pays ultimate price for growth
Wed Dec 10, 2008 10:27pm EST

By Emma Graham-Harrison and Vivi Lin

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...

Full story here.