China’s algae spread to resorts

The algae outbreak that threatened the Olympic sailing competition in Qingdao has spread hundreds of kilometres up the coast to popular tourist areas, even as Chinese officials on Friday claimed near-victory over the thick green sludge.

The long stretch of beach at Baishatan, 150km north of Qingdao, has been lined in recent days with 10-metre-wide slicks of algae that gave out a noxious odour to the few tourists who braved the sand, causing panic among tourist operators. Xu Xin, who has a stall selling seashells near the beach at Baishatan, said that the boardwalk would usually be packed at this time of year. “But look at it now, there is almost no one here,” she said. In front of her stall, two large earth-moving machines were scooping up chunks of the green algae that covered most of the beach. “They have cleaned the beach twice already, but it keeps coming back.”

“We are just coming into the summer holiday period,” said Ms Li, duty manager at the Jinxiang Villa Hotel, near Baishatan, who declined to give her full name. “If this continues for much longer then we will have big problems over the summer.”

The algae outbreak first appeared in Qingdao, the Shandong port city that is hosting the Olympic sailing competition next month. With many of the athletes already in the city to begin preparations, the city government has been working flat out to clear the algae from the competition area, calling in thousands of volunteers and soldiers and using hundreds of boats.

Officials said on Friday that only 1.37 per cent of the area was now covered in algae – they have pledged to clear it by July 15 – and a 32km-long net will keep out new outbreaks.

Just as the algae problem appears to be worsening, Xinhua news agency said this week pest-killers were trying to prevent a plague of locusts in Inner Mongolia from descending on Beijing – adding to the sense of near-biblical woes afflicting China.

State media have quoted a number of scientists playing down the health risks from the algae, which they said was a natural phenomenon.

Zhou Mingjiang, a researcher at the Institute of Oceanology in Beijing, said the algae in the sea was very different from the toxic blue-green algae that appeared in Taihu Lake in eastern China last year and forced the city of Wuxi to shut its water supply.

But, some environmental activists said the size of the algae outbreak was due to pollution from industry and fish farms.

“The natural ecosystem of the ocean has been destroyed, which is why strange events such as this can happen,” said Wen Bo, co-ordinator of Save China’s Seas Network.

ARSENIC FEARS

Burma’s cyclone-hit Irrawaddy delta and Indonesia’s Sumatra island face high risks of arsenic contamination in ground water that could cause cancer and other diseases in residents, according to a study released on Friday, reports AP from Bangkok.

Using a digitalised model that examines geological features and soil chemistry in south-east Asia, researchers writing in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience mapped several likely hot spots that had never been assessed for arsenic risks.

Arsenic, especially in drinking water, is a global threat to health, affecting more than 70 countries and 137m people.

The country worst affected is Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of people are in danger of dying from cancers of the lung, bladder and skin.

Odourless and tasteless, arsenic enters water supplies from natural deposits in the ground or from agricultural and industrial practices