China to move children from smelter

Thousands of villagers will be moved from their homes near the country’s biggest lead smelter after hundreds of children tested positive for lead poisoning. More than 1,000 children living in Jiyuan in central Henan Province were found to have excessive levels of metal in their blood, the China Daily newspaper says. Exposure to high levels of lead can cause anaemia and brain damage in children. The children living in 10 surrounding villages were moved away last week, and now the local government says a total of 15,000 people will be relocated.

The company which runs the smelter, Yugong Gold and Steel, said its plant bore some responsibility after toxic emissions from the plant were blamed for poisoning the children. Yugong Gold and Steel will pay the 1bn yuan (£90m), the official Xinhua news agency reported. The factory will keep running, with its owners leasing the land surrounding the plant from the farmers, and setting up an exclusion zone for nearby villages. It has also said it would plant trees outside the compound to try and prevent the spread of toxic emissions.

Villagers say the government has not acted quickly enough to address their concerns - no timetable has been fixed for the relocation. "The local government has been trying to stop us getting blood tests and making it public. They just want to protect the plant, which pays a great deal of tax every year," villager Huang Zhengmin told Reuters news agency. His 5-year-old grandson's blood tests showed nearly 500 micrograms of lead per litre, about 50 times the acceptable level in the United States. "They don't care about the life and death of us ordinary people. So the whole village has to be relocated to make way for the plant. The pollution just carries on." Another of the villagers said that high pollution levels were ignored in the quest for wealth. "A few people got rich, but the whole village is poisoned," 60-year-old Wang Shaozhou told Xinhua news agency. "How can we ignore people's health in the process of economic development?" Wang said.

The poisoning in Henan is the latest in a series of toxic accidents that have left thousands of children sick across China. Communist officials often turn a blind eye to the damage that China's rapid industrialisation does to the local people. Factories often make large contributions to local taxes. The Jiyuan cases came to light in the late summer, when parents of children with high lead and cadmium levels also protested at a smelter in Shaanxi province owned by the Dongling Group, China's fourth-largest zinc producer, and at a metals smelter in Hunan province.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children