China's dirtiest air indoors

BEIJING — China is home already to 16 of the planet's 20 most heavily polluted cities — a noxious byproduct of its double-digit economic growth. Now researchers have worse news for the nation's beleaguered lower classes: The air inside their homes is as much as 10 times worse than the prevailing gloom outside.

Seven of 10 homes still burn suffocating coal and wood for heat, and half of Chinese men smoke — a toxic combination of indoor pollution that raises dire questions about the fate of this industrial giant's long-term public health.

Over the next quarter-century, 83 million Chinese will die from lung cancer and respiratory ailments without a reduction of cigarette smoking and indoor fuel-burning, a new study by Harvard's School of Public Health warns.

"In many places in rural China, the roads are good, people now have cellphones and electricity, but residents are still cooking and heating with the same fuel they have used for centuries," said Majid Ezzati, an associate professor of international health and senior author of the study. "And as a result, people are dying."

In an article published this month in The Lancet, a leading medical journal, the Harvard team also concludes that programs to reduce smoking and household use of biomass fuels and coal for cooking and heating could significantly reduce the deaths.

The question, researchers say, is whether the Chinese government has the political will to enact sound public-health policy.

"This analysis shows that smoking and fuel use, which affects hundreds of millions of people in China, will be a defining feature of future health in that country," said Hsien-Ho Lin, a graduate student of epidemiology at Harvard's School of Public Health and lead author of the study.

Ezzati said he was working a few years ago with a team in central China when his team noticed the high level of deaths, which local residents did not seem to attribute to their household habits.

"People may know when they are in the house and it's very smoky and that it's making them cough — their chest may hurt and their eyes burn. They talk about symptoms and discomfort," he said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) in China calls the addiction of the nation's 250 million smokers devastating to public health. "The human suffering, productivity loss on a massive scale and the billions in health costs is an epidemic," said Sarah England, technical officer for the WHO's Tobacco Free Initiative.

"The new Harvard study is a wake-up call, but they only looked at some of the ways smoking kills in China. Cigarettes kill a million a year there. That's the highest death toll in the world by far."

"The Chinese government is the largest manufacturer of tobacco in the entire world — larger than all of U.S. tobacco," Ezzati said. "There's a huge economic incentive to continue making cigarettes."

Chinese officials have recently become more sensitive to the environmental cost of the country's economic boom after a series of high-profile pollution accidents and worldwide reports, before the Summer Olympics, on China's deadening air pollution.

8 Buddhist monks

convicted in bombing

BEIJING — Eight Buddhist monks convicted of bombing a government building in Tibet during an anti-government uprising in March have been sentenced to prison, two of them for life, a judge said Tuesday.

The monks were sentenced after being convicted of setting off a bomb at the building in Gyanbe township, said Gang Weilai, the judge who presided over the case at the People's Court in Chamdo, a Tibetan prefecture.

Gyanbe is about 855 miles east of Lhasa, Tibet's capital, where peaceful protests against Chinese rule erupted into violence in March.

Gyurmey Dhondup and Kalsang Tsering were sentenced to life in prison while the others received sentences between five and 15 years, Gang said in a telephone interview. He said the monks did not appeal their sentences.

The London-based Free Tibet Campaign said the monks were sentenced on Sept. 23, but it was not made public, a common practice in China for sensitive cases.

The Associated Press