Photos from Harbin showed residents covering their mouths with masks and scarves, moving like ghostly shadows through the fog. Cars and motorcycles moving slowly as traffic came to a standstill with traffic lights barely visible.
Just days previously, the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified air pollution as carcinogenic. It stated that there is "sufficient evidence" that exposure to outdoor air pollution causes lung cancer and also linked it with an increased risk of bladder cancer. It said that exposure has increased significantly particularly in "rapidly industrial countries with large populations" such as China.
"The air we breath has become polluted with a mixture of cancer-causing substances", Dr Kurt Straif, Head of the IARC Monographs Section said in a press released. "We now know that outdoor air pollution is not only a major risk to health in general, but also a leading environmental cause of cancer deaths."
These findings, while they show the gravity of China's air pollution problem, do not come as a shock to Chinese residents. Increasingly the health implications of pollution have been discussed online in local media.
On the Chinese social media site Weibo, many users complained about the pollution in Harbin and shared their concerns. One user, Wei Bang Zhu, wrote on Tuesday "someone should take responsibility for the smog…the price of pursuing high-speed development is that people end up being fed with smog. To venture out in an environment like this would be equivalent to teasing about one's own health and life."
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