Lead Sickens 1,300 Children in China

BEIJING — Lead pollution from a newly opened and unlicensed manganese smelter has poisoned more than 1,300 children in southeastern China’s Hunan Province, state-run media said on Thursday, the second case of mass lead poisoning in the past month.

Officials in Wenping, 970 miles south of Beijing, shut down the smelter, the Wugang Fine-Processed Manganese Smelting Factory, last week and detained two of its owners after about 1,000 local residents protested the poisoning, the English-language state newspaper China Daily reported.

The plant’s general manager remained at large.

Tests subsequently found elevated levels of lead in the blood of 1,354 children, or about 7 in 10 children who were examined, the official news agency, Xinhua, reported. The severity of the poisoning cannot be measured without further testing; 17 of the 83 children who received the advanced tests were hospitalized.

Lead poisoning damages the nervous and reproductive systems and can permanently cripple children’s growth and intellectual development.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/world/asia/21china.html?th&emc=th