China's central government said today it will investigate a report that close to 500 students became sick with illnesses including cancer at a school built near recently shut chemical plants in eastern China.
State broadcaster CCTV said in a report yesterday that high concentrations of some toxic chemicals may have caused cases of lymphoma and leukemia among students at the Foreign Languages School in the city of Changzhou, about 170 kilometres northwest of Shanghai.
The Education Ministry said today it has sent a team to investigate, while local officials in Jiangsu province said they will re-examine the issue after initially denying any soil quality issues in interviews with CCTV. The broadcaster said school and local officials may have only tested the site for common pollutants but overlooked chemicals and heavy metals involved in pesticide manufacturing next to the school site.
The ministry "attaches the greatest importance" to the reported problems and is committed to "safeguarding students' physical and mental wellbeing," the ministry said on its official microblog.
China has been wracked by public health scares, and countless Chinese took to social media again this week to fume about a case that touched a particularly sensitive subject: children. Last week, hundreds of officials across the country were punished over the sale of faulty children's vaccines.
The case also underscored the severity of China's groundwater pollution - an issue overshadowed by the country's notorious air quality problems - just one week after the Ministry of Water Resources published findings showing that more than 80 per cent of water in shallow groundwater wells in China is unfit for human consumption.
The Changzhou school with more than 2,000 students is adjacent to sites once occupied by Changlong, a chemical company that was previously fined by provincial regulators for environmental violations.
CCTV's investigative segment quoted a whistleblower who said workers dumped or buried chemical waste and many employees had contracted skin diseases themselves. One environmental assessment of soil at the site found levels of the toxic chemical chlorobenzene of nearly 95,000 times the national limit, while in another instance, testing was still ongoing as construction of the school began, resulting in "in a classic case of 'build first, assess later,'" CCTV said.
