Why is the Huaihe River called "cancer villages"?

On August 15, 2004, CCTV's "News Investigation" program broadcasted a program that people's health was seriously affected by water pollution. The following is an excerpt from the report: Maggie Huang Village, Zhou Ying Township, shenqiu county City, Henan Province is located on Sha Ying, the largest tributary of Huaihe River. About ten years ago, this beautiful village gradually began to be shrouded in the shadow of cancer.

Maggie Huang Village is a large administrative village, including Maggie Huang, Sulou and Lizhai. This village has 247 1 person and 726 households. The per capita arable land is less than one mu, and the per capita annual income is less than that of 800 yuan. In shenqiu county, a national poverty-stricken county, Maggie Huang Village is also considered a poverty-stricken village.

According to the statistics of the village Committee on the number of deaths in the village from 1990 to 2004, the number of deaths in 14 was 204, with an average annual mortality rate of 8? In the past, the natural mortality rate in this village was around 5‰, and the mortality rate was obviously high. Among the dead, cancer patients 105, accounting for 5 1? 5%; 77 people died normally, accounting for 37? 7%; 22 people died of unknown causes, accounting for 10? 8%; The prevalence of cancer is also significantly higher. The age of cancer death is mostly around 50 years old, and the youngest is only 1 year. During the investigation and interview, the reporter found that there are many disabilities and other difficult diseases in Maggie Huang village. According to statistics, 4 1 person is blind, deaf and physically disabled.

According to the reporter's investigation, the food of the villagers in Maggie Huang village is basically the same as that in the general northern countryside, and there is no air pollution source around the village. If it is not air and food, it is the villagers' drinking water that is most likely to cause cancer. There are 16 pits and ponds in Maggie Huang village, covering more than 300 mu of water surface, accounting for 1/5 of the total area of the village. There are ditches extending in all directions between pits and ponds, and there are three large main canals around the village. More than 100 cancer patients basically live near pits and ditches, while almost all people within a few hundred meters of pits and ditches have digestive tract diseases. It seems that the most likely cause of cancer, disease and death is water pollution.

So what are the substances in the water and how do they endanger people's lives? In order to find out these problems, the reporter invited some professionals from Fuyang City, Anhui Province, which is closest to here, to take five different water samples from five different waters in the village for scientific testing. These five kinds of water samples were taken from pits and ponds in the village, main canals outside the village and wells with different depths in villagers' homes. As long as the pollutant components of pollution sources, surface water and underground drinking water are detected according to the order of water pollution, what kind of relationship exists between cancer, disease, death and water pollution in this village can be scientifically explained. The water in the pit belongs to surface water, which has been detected by Fuyang Environmental Monitoring Station. Hydraulic well belongs to shallow underground drinking water, which has been tested by Fuyang Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to villagers, the water flowing into Maggie Huang Village comes from Shaying River, 2000 meters away. Locals used to call the section of Sha Ying River into Shenqiu Shahe, and Shaying River is the largest tributary of Huaihe River and the most polluted section of water over the years. At our request, the staff also took water samples from Shaying River. Now, on the surface, Shaying River is black.

According to the water quality test results provided by Fuyang Environmental Monitoring Station, the chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N) of three types of water, such as Shenqiu section of Shahe River, Maggie Huang Village Reservoir and main canal, have all exceeded the five types of water standards and belong to the inferior five types of water. According to the environmental quality standard of surface water in China, the surface water in Shahe and Maggie Huang villages is inferior to five categories, and has no use value. It can neither be used for industry nor agricultural irrigation, nor can it be used as a public water supply source.

According to the inspection report of Fuyang Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the water quality of the eight-meter, 10-meter and 30-meter pressure wells in Maggie Huang Village exceeded the national sanitary standard for drinking water quality to varying degrees. The shallower the well, the more items exceeding the standard and the higher the pollutant content. Villager Sun Deyi's 8-meter-deep water well has 8 pollutants exceeding the standard, and most of the water pressure wells in the village are about 8 meters. The three types of water injection wells are mainly nitrate nitrogen, manganese and total hardness. Among them, the nitrate nitrogen, manganese and total hardness of the 8-meter well exceeded the standard by nearly 3 times, 6 times and 3 times respectively.

Experts believe that excessive intake of water or food with high nitrate nitrogen content will induce some digestive tract cancers, such as esophageal cancer, gastric cancer and even liver cancer. Excessive content of ammonium nitrite will cause some changes in the body, that is to say, it is a carcinogen in itself, which will activate some carcinogens and make oncogenes mutate, thus causing tumors. It may not be seen for a short time, but the incidence rate may be higher as time goes by. Many dumb disabled people in the village are probably caused by excessive manganese. International studies have found that manganese has a significant effect on brain nerves. If exposed to high manganese, it will cause damage to the brain, cause some necrosis of the cerebral cortex, and cause some interference or damage to people's intellectual development or brain nerve activity.

According to scientific detection and expert analysis, the cancer, disability and even congenital heart disease of children in Maggie Huang village are closely related to water pollution in recent ten years. Great changes have taken place in the water quality of Maggie Huang village in the past ten years. According to the villagers, more than ten years ago, Maggie Huang was a land of plenty north of the Yangtze River. Every afternoon after 5 o'clock, there are many people taking a bath in the pit pond, like a big swimming pool. After 1990, no one took a bath in the pit and pond, because after taking a bath, pimples would grow all over the body, and the itching was uncomfortable.

Since the sewage from Shaying River flowed into Maggie Huang, the water in main canals and pits became darker and darker, and the fish and shrimp in the water gradually disappeared, while the cancer and death in the village increased year by year. So, how is the Sha Ying River polluted? Sha Ying is the largest tributary of the Huaihe River, with a total length of 6 19km, accounting for more than 60% of the water inflow of the Huaihe River. Since the end of 1980s, industrial sewage and domestic sewage from Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, Luohe, Xuchang and Zhoukou in the upper reaches have all been discharged to the tributaries of Shaying River, and then merged into Shaying River in Zhoukou. Liu Qiang has always been the director of shenqiu county Environmental Protection Bureau. He witnessed the history of Shaying River being polluted for more than ten years.

There is a song circulating on both sides of Huaihe River: (20th century) rice washing and vegetables washing in 1950s, irrigation in 1960s, water quality deterioration in 1970s, fish and shrimp death in 1980s, and diarrhea causing cancer in 1990s.

Huaidianmen once made shenqiu county a famous grain-producing county in China. However, since the clean water turned into sewage, hundreds of millions of cubic meters of sewage was sent to every village in the county by the trunk canal network extending in all directions, and 2 1 towns in the county were all polluted, which brought huge and lasting disasters to millions of people in Shenqiu. The economic benefits obtained by a few enterprises are at the expense of the lives and health of millions of people and catastrophic losses. Have you calculated this economic account? After the media focused on the cancer villages in the Huaihe River Basin, Wen Jiabao, Premier of the State Council, gave instructions to "conduct in-depth investigation and study on the high incidence of tumors in the Huaihe River Basin". A preliminary survey conducted by researchers in the Huaihe River basin confirmed the existence of some "cancer villages". Statistics from the Ministry of Health show that the cancer mortality rates in shenqiu county, Henan Province and yingdong district, Fuyang City, Anhui Province, which are located in the middle and upper reaches of the Huaihe River Basin, have been higher than the national average. Moreover, from the upstream, middle and downstream of Huaihe River Basin, the mortality rate of digestive system tumors showed a gradient upward trend, and some areas in the downstream were "much higher" than those in the upper and middle reaches. It is doubtful that in some areas of Huaihe River basin, environmental pollution may have aggravated the increase of cancer incidence.

To some extent, the cancer problem in Huaihe River basin or other villages is only a microcosm of the negative impact of China's economic development, which has sounded the alarm for environmental protection.