Advertisement

Shanghai pollution blamed for high cancer rate

BEIJING -- The cancer death rate in crowded Shanghai has more than doubled in the past 25 years and scientists say severe industrial pollution in China's biggest metropolis is the overwhelming cause, an official newspaper reported Friday.

The People's Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, said the mortality rate from cancer in the teeming city of 12 million, also China's largest urban industrial center, is now the highest in the country.

Advertisement

The warning was the latest in a recent series of articles in the Chinese press about the dangers of pollution. More liberal regulations and unbridled industrial growth under the country's economic reforms have wrought havoc with the environment.

The People's Daily said the cancer death rate in Shanghai has risen 234 percent since 1963 and that scientists believe the major cause is pollution from the city's 10,000 factories and thousands of other sources of contamination.

According to scientists from the East China Teachers University's Environmental Science Department and the Shanghai Institute of Tumors, 80 percent of the city's cancer deaths are now linked to environmental pollution of water and air.

A survey between 1983 and 1985 detected more than 700 types of pollutants in the Huangpu River, which winds through the city, and nearly 800 in the city's drinking water supplies, fed from the surrounding area.

Advertisement

The newspaper said 60.8 percent of cancer deaths among men in Shanghai were from lung, stomach and liver cancer and 48.8 percent of cancer deaths among women were from those three causes as well as breast cancer.

Scientists have linked an increase in lung cancer rates to benzopyrene, a carcinogenic combustion product found in cigarette smoke and coal tar, the newspaper said.

Most Chinese still heat their homes and cook with coal-burning braziers, adding to pollution in one of the world's most densely populated urban centers.

Cancer and environment experts have urged Shanghai authorities to popularize switching from coal to natural gas as fuel and to develop waterworks that can divert water from the upper reaches of the Huangpu as a less polluted source of drinking water.

Latest Headlines