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China reports the fifth death related to bird flu.
Pardon my skepticism, but when it comes to the Chinese government and providing the rest of the world with possibly reputation-damaging information, I can’t take their word for it – especially when it comes to the deadly combo of disease, high population and low income and sanitation. I predict that more, likely many more, than five people have died from bird flu, and that the government is perfectly aware of it.
The Chinese government has always scared me a little bit. I know I’m not exactly alone in this. “You can take this subway line to get to the mall,” a friend told me when I was visiting her in Hong Kong, “but don’t fall asleep or anything, or you’ll wake up in China.” There were some murmurings when Google agreed to censor search results in China, and, you know, there are those ongoing human rights violations that sort of got swept under the rug during the Olympics. (Not that, with China’s economic force as it is, they had to be swept very far.) Now that the tainted milk scandal that I touched on briefly before has reached new heights, and MSNBC reported today that the Chinese government is trying to do a little damage control.
Lawyers in Beijing said law officials there had nudged them to be “aware of the general picture” and to heed and have trust in the government’s handling of the scandal.
And because this is the Chinese government, I worry about how hard they “nudged” and what the consequences of not heeding the government’s handling are. I worry, too, that China has become too much a juggernaut for the world community to do anything about it if/when/as they cross the line. But, for once, the numbers that give the country its leviathan status may work against the government – there are just too many people and too many sick babies to make everyone hush and go home.
In this day and age, with “organic” being the specialty item and the regular old pesticide-treated foods being the norm, I have to wonder just how much pesticide has to be on/in/otherwise around something for it to be considered tainted. Probably not the question I was supposed to be asking when the Yomiuri reported on tainted rice produced in China distributed to 119 facilities in Japan, but there we have it. Though the Yomiuri focuses on the role of shipper and sales firm Misaka Foods, the fact that the rice came from China doesn’t really help in conjunction with the baby formula recall in China after about 50 cases of kidney stones and one death as the result of babies drinking tainted formula. The culprit, an excess of melamine in the mix, is reminiscent of the pet food recall last year, and is one in a long line of tainted/dangerous/otherwise bad news products from China.
There isn’t exactly a plus side to infant and pet deaths or products being consumed without warning from a shipping company that might have known they were tainted, but there’s something like a less-depressing side. Because there’s really no way to sweep dead children under the rug (at least not those killed by corporations – female infanticide by families remains, as usual, a different story) China’s Health Ministry has been doing damage control. We can probably expect the hammer to come down on formula producer Sanlu Group Co. as a result, and some stricter (if not necessarily strict) regulations on industries across the board.
Now were is the (ideally death-free) labor scandal to force fair pay and working conditions in China? Though that would jack up the price of our precious disposable fashion. I’m not sure there are enough unregulated third-world countries to fill the gap if China ever got on board with labor laws.
