Solo post by Emely (Cancer Villages Analysis)

 In today’s China, along with the rapid economic development reflected on growing GDP, the number of people who developed certain illnesses caused by pollutions is also growing at an alarming rate. According to author Nguyen’s article, the research and reports on “cancer villages” in China emerged in the 1970s, however, this topic did not get enough attention until the early 2000s. After years of intensive investigation on cancer villages conducted by both local and foreign scientists, they claimed there is a clear link between the numbers of villages downstream and industrial activities upstream. Sadly, even “cancer village” crisis receives a lot of attention from the public via social media, there are still many difficulties and challenges faced by patients, owners of heavy-industries, policymakers, and environmental scientists in finding an effective and practical to mitigate this crisis. In the following passage, I will address some of the salient hinders presented in Nguyen’s report and compared them with the case in Toms River.

Same as the biggest difficulty faced by Fagin in analyzing Toms River case, scientists claimed that it is really hard to use rigorous scientific method to prove a potential causal relationship between disease and specific chemical hazard. Because of this limitation, most government agencies and courts refused to take those “un-authoritative” conclusion into account in making environmental policy and rejected the appeal from villagers. Different from Toms River case, Nguyen also mentioned the economic loss due to the unregulated chemical pollutions happened in many villages. Since scientists could collect enough concrete evidence and data to link the agriculture damage to increasing harmful chemical-residues in soil and water, sometimes villagers won the lawsuit and got some economic compensation. However, according to Nguyen, the money, after distributed to each villager,  is far from enough to both covers the economic loss and uncertain health risks. 

Worse yet, another challenge for solving cancer cluster in certain areas is polluter cluster or mixed of pollutants. In the report, Nguyen mentioned an extreme example in Huai River Delta where thousands of small to large factories are free to dump their wastes into rivers. It is hard for scientists to figure out what pollutant is most strongly cause cancer and which company then should take the most responsibility to nearby cancer villages. Moreover, these factories are private so they “protect” themselves by hiding the sensitive information which prevents scientists to collect useful data. Combined with loose regulations by local government, some polluters just are protected under a dark umbrella.

One solution for urgent cancer village crisis now is migration. However, Nguyen stated that it is a short-term emergency measure and even that is difficult to accomplish. The people who lived in cancer villages often lack enough money to migrate, lack education on dangers of chemical residues and unwilling to move due to emotional connection to the land. Personally, I think the most important and basic step to deal with this crisis is finding the causal relationship between pollutions and diseases and use that as evidence to urge government to take actions. It leads to the topic in our discussion that should we always rely on science, statistics, and principles to guide our action? I think the statistical method is a powerful way to determine a causal relationship but only if scientists could collect enough data. There must be other alternative ways to scientifically analyze the relationship between environmental pollution and illness when there is no large sample set such as animal experiment and long-term individual case study. The cost of waiting science to solve all our problems is unaffordable, far more than several lives.

Reference:

http://labos.ulg.ac.be/hugo/wp-content/uploads/sites/38/2017/11/The-State-of-Environmental-Migration-2015-77-87.pdf