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There is an 8-Year-Old Girl With Lung Cancer, and China"s Smog is to Blame

There is an 8-Year-Old Girl With Lung Cancer, and China’s Smog is to Blame Image Credit: AP

In the first case of its kind, an eight-year-old girl in China has become the youngest person in history to be diagnosed with lung cancer. Local doctors believe that China’s skyrocketing levels of air pollution are to blame. While rare, this case highlights the extreme degree to which China is undercutting its own economy and health with an outdated and inefficient growth model.

Every minute, there are six new cases of cancer in China, and every year there are two million related deaths a year. In 2010 alone, there were an estimated 1.2 million in premature deaths. These were largely due to air pollution, which is the largest environmental risk. Such loss of damage and cost to future economic activity is believed to have cost China $ 230 billion in 2010. Other examples of China’s pollution woes include a case from October of this year, when toxic smog forced the 11 million strong city of Harbin to shut down. The smog caused visibility to drop to ten meters, causing schools to cancel classes and airports to close. Such incidents are also alarming China’s neighbors as factories and power plants in China have caused increased acid rain to fall on Seoul and Tokyo.

Such telling statistics have been occasionally censored in certain official Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reports, since they could be damaging to the party’s reputation and growth strategy. China’s method of economic development is important because not only is it officially institutionalized, but also economic growth is what provides the legitimacy on which the CPP rests.

Over the last 30 years, the CCP’s shift from socialism to state capitalism has lifted over 500 million Chinese out of poverty. In the late 1980s, Deng Xiaoping created a new incentive system in which provincial and local officials are judged and promoted based on two criteria: continual economic growth in their jurisdiction and suppressing dissent. Central plans for economic growth and tight competition to be promoted resulted in local officials trying to outdo their peers’ growth in provincial and city GDPs.

In rural China, land is still collectivized and peasants lease the land and are without private property rights. Because of this, local official often seize their land for development, providing little compensation while selling the land at high rates to private or, more often, state-run companies.

These perverted incentives also cause officials to support or turn a blind eye to projects that are less energy or cost efficient, but boost short-term GDP and are quick to complete. Examples of this include little to no insulation in most new buildings and the use of long outdated turbine technology in power plants.

The result has been soaring economic growth fueled by an artificial stimulus of land and house prices without great concern for future growth, the environment, or local dissent. Real estate, housing, development, and their related industries now account for about a third of China’s economy and real concerns have emerged that the CCP’s political incentives are creating a housing bubble on the scale of America’s infamous 2008 one.

Putting this another way, imagine for a moment if American governors and mayors were judged over how much economic growth they could create and that they were given free use of imminent domain to achieve such growth. They could send the policy to seize as much land to give to Walmart or General Motors as they’d like and all they have to do was provide a meager penance as compensation. That is the source of China’s environmental and future economic woes; citizens have no legal recourse and politicians have no incentive to think in the long term.

China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection is also very weak. In fact, state owned companies block or ignore regulations on a regular basis. Also, half-hearted efforts by President Hu Jintao to include a into the evaluations of local officials has made no difference. Initially designed to take into account the cost of pollution, the measure was scrapped because of the many of the new growth calculations were close to zero in several provinces.

While environmental degradation as a side effect of the industrialization is the norm throughout history, and arguably nearly impossible to avoid, there is no comparison to China’s juggernaut. Never before has a state had economic growth and environmental problems on such a massive scale, and thus there is no previous case to go by. And so far, China has made some progress but the results are mixed and the long-term outcome uncertain.

On one hand, China has undertaken a $ 200 billion green and nuclear energy initiative and has begun experimenting with cap and trade as theoretical solutions in some special zones. Also despite how bad things are, most of China’s cities are “no more polluted than Japan’s were in 1960 … [and] air quality is improving at about the same rate as Japan’s did in the 1970s.”

Yet at the same time, many other parts of China’s environment are much worse, such as the Yellow River in the north, which serves 50% of all Chinese and irrigates 60% of all farmland, and is in grave overuse. Pollution has also caused almost 500 million Chinese to be without access to safe drinking water.

Thus, it is difficult to tell what lies in China’s environmental future and whether Beijing is unable or unwilling to change its top-down incentives for short-term growth despite the cost.

Either way, China’s top-heavy model of growth is due for an overhaul.

John Grover

Senior at Bowdoin College. Love all things political, especially international relations. Am a moderate conservative who draws upon a classical liberal understanding of the social contract. Hope to join in building a better world through the State …

PolicyMic

There is an 8-Year-Old Girl With Lung Cancer, and China"s Smog is to Blame

Gizmo Uses Lung Cells To Sniff Out Health Hazards In Urban Air

Cities like Houston are dotted with air-sniffing monitors that measure levels of benzene and other potentially unhealthy air pollutants. But those monitors can’t answer the question we care about most: Is the air safe?

That’s because there’s no simple relationship between toxic air pollutants and health risks. Researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill are trying to get a leg up on that problem. They are building an instrument that uses human lung cells to measure health hazards in the air more directly.

To work on the instrument, researchers here cook up their own dirty air in a greenhouse on top of a campus building. Professor Harvey Jeffries leads us up a steep ladder and into the greenhouse, which is made of clear Teflon film.

“So it’s filled with clean air to begin with, but we can create any kind of atmosphere in here that simulates any place on the earth — or any place in Los Angeles,” Jeffries says. “We can try diesel cars, or we can try diesel trucks.”

Enlarge image i

Harvey Jeffries, in a greenhouse on the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, campus that can simulate the atmosphere of any location on Earth.

Richard Harris/NPR

Harvey Jeffries, in a greenhouse on the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, campus that can simulate the atmosphere of any location on Earth.

Richard Harris/NPR

Pipes draw exhaust from tailpipes right up to this chamber. You wouldn’t want to inhale the gases right out of a tailpipe, of course. But breathing exhaust from the air turns out to be even worse.

“If you put the same material in here and cook it in the sun for a day, it becomes anything from five to 12 times more toxic,” Jeffries says.

He suspects that sunlight triggers these particles to soak up nasty chemicals in the air. The particles, which might start out as a puff of carbon in diesel exhaust, get transformed into little packages that deliver chemicals deep into lung tissue when you inhale.

Unfortunately, health officials don’t take that sort of synergy into account. Jeffries says they assume a particle is a particle is a particle.

“If you don’t do this kind of chemistry, you miss what’s really going on in the atmosphere,” he says.

The air from here gets piped into a laboratory directly below. Jeffries’ collaborator, Will Vizuete, says this research is challenging the conventional wisdom about particles and health. It’s not simply how much of the stuff you breathe in that counts.

“Not all particles are created equal. Some particles happen to be more toxic than other particles,” Vizuete says.

And Jeffries concurs: “The health effects for particle exposure in New York are different from health effects for particle exposures in South Carolina and in the desert or in California.”

The effects depend on what happened to that particle while it was circulating in the sunny air. And that’s where the new instrument comes in.

In a lab directly underneath the rooftop “greenhouse,” Vizuete and Jeffries show off a machine that sucks in air from the chamber above. The air blows across samples of human lung cells, which grow in small indentations in the instrument. If the air is toxic, the cells send out hormone-like distress signals that scientists can measure. The worse the air, the more “Help! Help!” signals the cells send out.

“The advantage of using a biological sensor is it says ‘I’m being harmed. I don’t care if you don’t know what’s causing me harm, I’m being harmed,’ ” Jeffries says. “That means it draws attention, it makes you do the work and do a better job of figuring out what’s going on.”

And it tells you, whatever’s going on — watch out for that air.

Jeffries and Vizuete see this approach as an important departure from the way air is tested today. Current tests measure chemicals in the air and then infer health risks based on some simple assumptions. Vizuete says the goal here is to build devices like this, and sell them to scientists who can put them up all around cities, to monitor the air for actual biological hazards.

Enlarge image i

This devices uses lung cell to checks the air smog components the hurt human health.

Richard Harris/NPR

This devices uses lung cell to checks the air smog components the hurt human health.

Richard Harris/NPR

Hardware is actually being built in the building’s basement. This school of public health has an unusual facility: a fully equipped machine shop, full of lathes and other digitally-driven shop tools.

On the day of our visit, the first prototype was still under construction. Eventually they hope to put the parts together into a plastic frame about the size of a paperback book.

Of course this being a university, not a factory, the instrument is only being developed here.

“So right now, the hope is to maybe get two — or hopefully five — of these out of this shop, and then immediately find another kind of tech shop to produce these at a large scale,” Vizuete says. Chapel Hill has small tech companies that could easily do this work. The human lung cells are already commercially available.

The instrument isn’t as simple to operate as the current chemical “sniffers,” though — technicians must collect samples from the devices by hand. Those samples then get analyzed in a lab.

Vizuete has started a company, called Biodeptronics, to mass-produce these instruments. And he’s hoping that they’ll be for sale later this year. The first customers would be academics who are interested in learning more about air pollution. But Vizuete’s vision is that someday these biological sensors will get scattered around cities. Instead of simply telling us what chemicals are in the air, they might tell us something about the actual health risks.

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Gizmo Uses Lung Cells To Sniff Out Health Hazards In Urban Air