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As the Chinese economy roars ahead, some pay with their lives. Chinese industry is dangerous -- its mining industry the deadliest in the world -- and for some local officials and company managers workers' health counts for little before the pursuit of growth, growth, growth.

When six workers died in a subway tunnel collapse in Beijing last week, company management's instinct was to try to cover up the accident -- they confiscated workers' phones and ordered them not to talk to police.

Accidents are not the only risk workers run. Occupational -- or work-related -- diseases such as silicosis and pneumoconiosis -- which affects the lungs -- are also killers. Apart from mining, leather-making, construction and chemicals are other dangerous sectors where the rate of occurrence of occupational disease is high.

Vice Health Minister Jiang Zuojun said on March. 16, 2005, that more than 580,000 cases of lung disease had been reported in China since the 1950s and 140,000 people had died from the disease.

In April 2005, a Chinese Ministry of Health (MOH) official said there are more than 16 million companies in China whose production processes are dangerous or poisonous and more than 200 million Chinese workers are at risk of occupational disease, many of them in small-town industrial enterprises.

Summing up the situation in a report to China's National People's Congress (NPC), the MOH Thursday blasted companies and local governments who ignore workers' health and their legitimate rights. It described China's occupational disease situation as "grim".

The MOH said slack supervision of employers and poor coordination between government departments had combined to give China an "F" fail report card for the prevention of occupational diseases.

China implemented an occupational diseases prevention law back in May 2002. The country had begun to tackle the problem of occupational diseases in the 1950s, but it was not until the Management Regulation on Silicosis was published in the 1980s that a proper legal framework began to be established.

But many firms fail to abide by the law on occupational diseases prevention.

The report predicted that the incidence of occupational disease in China will continue to increase in the next 10 to 15 years before real work safety measures can begin to take effect.

The NPC has now decided to send a team to investigate how the occupational diseases prevention law is implemented by local governments.

Better prevention of occupational disease is urgently needed to protect workers' legitimate rights, the report said, urging both local governments and companies to improve their performance.

But the report failed to provide detailed figures about how many Chinese suffer from occupational diseases.

(Xinhua News Agency April 6, 2007)