More efforts needed to protect public health

Public health issues regularly make headlines in China today, with each reported case of children sickened by pollution resulting in renewed calls for tougher prevention measures.

In April, hundreds of students at a high school in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, were found to have "abnormal" blood readings after moving to a new campus, which reportedly was built on land previously occupied by a chemical plant.

Residents in rural towns and villages with higher-than-average cancer rates also regularly attribute the problem to the air, water or soil pollution (or all three) caused by nearby industrial activities.

In May, international organizations including the United Nations Environment Program and the World Health Organization released a report that said 12.6 million deaths worldwide were linked to deteriorating environmental conditions in 2012, accounting for 23 percent of all deaths.

Air pollution alone killed 7 million people a year, with roughly 654,000 people dying from lead poisoning in 2010, it said. The report added that environmental degradation and pollution are also responsible for more than one-fourth of all deaths in children under 5.

The areas worst affected by these problems are in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific, it said.

According to Achim Steiner, executive director of the UNEP: "From air pollution and chemical exposure to the mining of our natural resource base, we have compromised our life-support systems."

Recognizing the importance of protecting public health, the central government included several stipulations in the revised Environmental Protection Law, which took effect on Jan 1, 2015. These included the need to improve monitoring of the environment and public health, improve the risk-assessment system and encourage more research on the effects of environmental degradation on humans.

More importantly, local authorities were urged to take measures to prevent and control pollution-related deceases.

However, officials have so far rarely mentioned these articles, let alone applied them, Lyu Zhongmei, a senior government adviser on social and legislative issues, recently told news website The Paper. She said authorities needed comprehensive data on the risks posed by various pollutants and suggested they set up teams tasked with coordinating the work of agencies responsible for environmental protection, healthcare and the private sector.

Wan Yue, director of environment and health management at the Ministry of Environmental Protection, agreed in The Paper report that government departments needed to work more closely together to overcome the hurdles in building monitoring and data-sharing networks.

"The central government needs a special mechanism and agencies to implement it," Lyu was quoted as saying.