China Says 300M Drink Unsafe Water

[Divine Discontent]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/29/world/main1168981.shtml


AP) About 300 million people living in China's vast countryside drink unsafe water tainted by chemicals and other contaminants, the government said Thursday in its latest acknowledgment of mounting risks from widespread pollution.

The most common threat to water, after drought, is chemical pollutants and other harmful substances that contaminate drinking supplies for 190 million people, state media quoted E Jingping, a vice minister for water resources, as saying.

The report follows recent chemical spills in the northeast and south of the country that temporarily spoiled water supplies for millions of people and highlighted the severity of the pollution crisis.

The problems are not limited to the countryside. About 90 percent of China's cities have polluted ground water, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing a recent nationwide survey.

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[lovuian]

1. China has polluted itself and needs to get a new water source

these poor people!!!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. When I was there in 1990, we were told not to drink unboiled water

because of poor sewage treatment. Indeed, Chinese people seemed not to drink unboiled water either.

But what do you do to deal with the problem of mercury or cadmium in your drinking water, due to industrializing so fast that your environmental laws can't keep up? Boiling does no good at all.

I fear that China will have to have a few "Minamata" incidents* before they wake up.


*Minamata is a city in southern Japan where the residents began experiencing neurological difficulties in the late 1960s, as well as children born with severe brain damage. Their problems were traced to eating fish contaminated with mercury that the local chemical plant had just dumped into the nearby bay without treatment.

Minamata was only the most famous environmental disaster of that period, most likely because some photographers happened to document it in Life magazine. There were other, equally as horrible instances of poisoning by different industrial chemicals throughout Japan, and nasty air pollution. Visitors of Japan used to talk of air pollution so bad that they ended up with greasy black soot in their hair at the end of the day, even if they had washed their hair that same morning. Fortunately, the Japanese government woke up and took such measures as controlling the dumping of toxic waste and requiring taxis and buses to use natural gas instead of gasoline.

[ny_liberal]

3. Environmental terrorists