China - Poison in the drinking water

Poison in the drinking water
China's appalling pollution problemsBy correspondent Karen Meirik*
04-03-2009
.............The thousand inhabitants of Leifeng couldn't have lived in a more remote spot. The village, near the border with Siberia, is covered in a thick layer of snow during the winter. Not surprisingly, then, it is home to a small alcohol factory, which produces 'baijiu', the Chinese version of vodka. But the factory proved to be more of a curse than a blessing, as 14-year-old Zhang Guanghui explains:

"My mother worked in the factory for three months. She treated the bottles with acid, so the glass looked frosted. The work made her ill. Now she's dead. We had to sell our house. My father now works a long way away and I live with my uncle."

The acid that Guanghui's mother used to etch to bottles was hydrofluoric acid. The exposure to it during her work, in combination with the polluted drinking water, proved fatal. Because as Guanghui's neighbour explains, the factory was also dumping large quantities of the chemical in three disused wells in the factory grounds. And thus it entered the groundwater and the wells for drinking water used by the village's farming families. Guanghui's mother is the only person to die of the poisoning up to now, but hundreds of villagers are ill.

Brittle bones
Guanghui looks like a boy of ten. The growth of other children in Leifeng has also been retarded by their exposure to the pollutant. Fluoride seems innocent enough but high concentrations in drinking water can cause brittle bones and damage teeth as well as causing memory loss and eye, stomach and liver problems. Chinese research has also indicated that high concentrations of fluoride in children can lead to a reduction in IQ.