Official suspended for mass lead poisoning
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An environmental protection official in an eastern China county has been suspended for improper supervision and poor law enforcement after an investigation showed that a battery manufacturing plant located alongside a densely-populated community was responsible for lead poisoning that sickened over 200 children.
Twenty-eight of the victims were hospitalized, local authorities said Saturday.
Zhao Yiping, director of the environmental protection bureau in Huaining county, which administers Gaohe Town where the children were poisoned, has been removed from his post after tests conducted on Wednesday and Thursday confirmed that excessive lead emissions from Borui Battery Co. Ltd. had polluted the nearby soil, said a spokesman with the provincial government.
Earlier, Borui had failed the necessary environmental checks and was asked to close in August 2010, pending the improvement of its environmental protection facilities, however the company later resumed production without notifying the government, said the spokesman.
In health screenings of 307 children in Gaohe, 228 children were diagnosed with high blood lead levels.
Excessive amounts of lead in the blood can damage the digestive, nervous, and reproductive systems and cause stomach aches, anemia and convulsions.
According to the spokesman, lead levels in the 23 most seriously poisoned children have dropped to normal after doctors adjusted their diets to help expel lead from the children's systems as parents worried that drugs used to diminish lead in the blood were too strong for their young children.
China's environmental protection authority regulations specify that no battery plant should be built within a radius of 500 meters of residential communities.
Anhui's provincial environmental protection department has since ordered a full-scale review of all battery manufacturers in the province to determine what steps have been taken by the plants to fulfill their environmental protection requirements.
Battery manufacturing plants are often blamed for lead poisoning in children.
In July last year, four children living near a battery plant in east China's Jiangsu province were found to be suffering from lead poisoning.
A similar incident was reported in South China's Guangdong province in December 2009, where at least 25 children living near a battery plant were found to have excessive lead levels in their bloods.
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