A growing number of parents sensed that something had gone wrong in their impoverished town of Ganhetan in Northwest China's Qinghai Province. But none had any idea of exactly what it was.

Fears deepened after their children began complaining of periodic stomach aches, poor appetite and repeated flu attacks. Alarmingly, some even exhibited slow reflexes.

What a middle school headmaster told them next only added to their anxiety: Many of their children had been atypically hyperactive recently, resulting in poor performance in school.

Distraught and perplexed, the parents decided it was time to start searching for an answer. They took their children, more than 100 altogether, to the best and most well-equipped hospital in the provincial capital of Xining. The kids underwent medical tests to find out what was wrong with them.

But the parents were not prepared for what followed, when blood tests revealed the cause of their children's illness: Lead poisoning. All of them.

The CCTV news probe that followed revealed that the children were born and raised in a town that is now home to a cluster of lead-smelting factories, none of them equipped with proper, if any, pollution treatment facilities. So poisonous were the gas emissions that workers had to wear surgical and gas masks to protect them.

Media exposure prompted the local government to conduct tests on 919 children aged under 12 to determine the level of lead in their blood. The results were startling, with only 31 children showing normal lead levels (0 to 99 micrograms in a litre of whole blood). The rest were either immoderately exposed or outright poisoned.

A highly toxic substance, lead poses a greater danger to children than to adults. Their faster rate of metabolism prompts them to breathe faster, making it easier for lead to creep in. Children also tend to play and breathe closer to the ground where lead dust concentrates. They are also prone to put their hands in their mouths and take in lead.

Lead exposure can produce a wide range of illnesses such as abdominal pain, vomiting, loss of hearing and kidney damage. But perhaps the most damaging feature of lead poisoning is that even a very low level of exposure could result in reduced IQ and learning disabilities.

For a developing country like China, striving to drive its economy more on inspiration than perspiration, what kind of loss is greater than a future generation of children losing their IQ?

Ganhetan, however, is just one of many hinterland towns and cities to be swarmed by polluting industries. As China's coastal economies move up the value-added chain, more manufacturing industries, many of them polluting ones, are shifting their bases to the country's hinterland.

Despite criticism that they choose to look the other way when faced with the pollution problem, hinterland cities' government officials often have their own tale to tell. They argue that the industries, polluting as they may be, are a major source of revenue for the local governments and that they contribute to the GDP growth and create jobs.

Faced with the challenges of creating employment for a growing population and raising standards of living, many cities and towns such as Ganhetan in underdeveloped Northwest China have found it difficult to resist the arrival of polluting industries.

Despite mounting pressure to clean up its act, the government of Ganhetan is ready to usher in a couple more lead smelting units, local residents told the CCTV news team.

Many local government officials are faithful subscribers to the pollution-development formula of "grow first, clean up later." But if they are bringing up a future generation that lacks intelligence and an entire labour force that would only function at low intellectual levels, how could the economy possibly sustain its growth?

Email: zouhr@chinadaily.com.hk

(China Daily 04/28/2006 page4)