Lung diseases: China's killing fields

Trinitas Imaging / Ooodit via FlickrAfter all the unrest the melamine milk scandal has caused, you might forget that there are really more important health problems in China. The BBC summarizes a Harvard report suggesting that the number of Chinese dying from lung disease will be over 80 million in the coming 25 years.
Now, that problem is far from new and the ongoing stories of masses of people jumping off hospital roofs rather than wait for a slow death through lung cancer have been rampant as long as I have been involved with China.
The shocking part of the new report is not only that those gruesome ways to eliminate the aging are not only preventable, but that the numbers are going up rather than down. In Shanghai and other big cities I have seen how big investments were made in kitchens to make the living climate more healthy: burning wood and coal in the home is one of the reasons for lung diseases. Better ventilation and changing to natural gas as fuel have made a big impacts. The action against smoking, both in public spaces and in the homes, have changed big parts of China's social live in the past decade. But the number of deaths is only going up. Chinese men, and increasingly women, smoke in different places, but still smoke massively.
Truly a very gruesome way to get rid of the aging.

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