'Cancer villages' alarm water pollution crisis

A chemical risk control plan issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection in February this year mentioned serious health and social problems such as cancer villages in some areas.

Quality drinking water is vital to people's health. The rate of cancer cases will be high among people who drink polluted water, according to Li Jinghong, a chemistry professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Drinking water in north China mainly comes from underground and nitrates, ammonia and heavy metals are common pollutants of underground water, said Zheng Chunmiao, a water resource researcher at Peking University.

Some 44 percent of shallow underground water in the North China Plain, which covers Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Beijing and Tianjin, suffer pollution to different degrees, according to a five-year survey completed by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in 2010.

According to figures released by the top environmental watchdog last year, ground water in 57 percent of monitoring sites across China is polluted or extremely polluted. In addition, 298 million rural residents do not have access to safe drinking water.

Government efforts to deal with water pollution are under way.

The Chinese government vowed in March to solve the problems of serious air, water and soil pollution that affect the people's vital interests and improve environmental quality.

China aims to curb the worsening trend of groundwater quality in the North China Plain by 2015 and realize a remarkable improvement of groundwater quality by 2020, according to an official water pollution control plan for the region.

In May, the top environmental watchdog fined 88 companies 6.13 million yuan (about 0.99 million U.S. dollars) for violations resulting in underground water pollution in a 40-day campaign focused in north China.

"Air and water are the most important for people," said villager Sun. "We want the chemical factories nearby to be moved elsewhere as soon as possible."

Sun Bo, head of the Shandong Provincial Department of Environmental Protection, said polluting companies were directly related to the pollution problem facing cancer villages, but government departments should also be held accountable for their approval of such companies.

Polluting companies should be closed and effective measures taken to restore the ecological environment, said Sun.