Parents say running track making kids sick
Print Edition
LOCAL authorities yesterday launched an investigation into a spate of illnesses — from nosebleeds to coughs and skin and eye irritations — among students using an artificial running track at a newly built elementary school in Songjiang District.
The area is also industrial and home to several chemical factories.
At least 75 of the Sijing No. 3 Elementary School’s 400 students, mainly first graders, have come down with ailments since the newly built school opened last month, parents say.
Parents and students complain the playground emits toxic fumes and the situation is so bad that many pupils are staying home, too scared to go to school.
The Songjiang educational authority said yesterday it had launched an investigation into the complaints, despite independent studies last month saying the grounds were within acceptable standards.
One father, who gave his name only as Liu, told Shanghai Daily his son started at the school when it opened and had suffered a bad nosebleed about two weeks later.
“He actually also had a skin rash on his back but we did not take it seriously,” Liu said. “But occasionally as we talked with other parents, we got to know that many other students also had similar symptoms and some had experienced repeated nosebleeds.
“If it’s an individual accident, we would not suspect the campus environment, but it happened on such a large scale.”
Liu and some other parents then stopped sending their children to the school to avoid further risk. Liu and another father, Zhan, said their sons’ symptoms disappeared after they stopped going to school.
Some parents conducted an informal, voluntary survey and found at least 75 students — almost 20 percent of the student population – had similar health problems .
They suspect the plastic running surface, which they say gives out an unpleasant odor.
Students in the No. 4 class of first grade, which is closest to the playground, were the first to show symptoms, parents told Shanghai Daily.
Zhan said he had stood on the playground on September 30 with some other parents and still smelt a heavy odor despite the windy and rainy weather that day.
Liu said the school had invited third-party institutes to carry out two rounds of sample tests last month and both showed the track met the latest standards for limits of hazardous substances in artificial surfaces of sports grounds in schools.
City authorities introduced the standards last year after two local kindergartens and several schools in other cities reported problems with artificial surfaces.
Sijing No. 3 has also taken other measures, such as washing the surfaces and putting plants and air purifiers into classrooms.
It is also sending teachers out to visit absent students at home to persuade their parents to let them return.
The school’s official WeChat account sent posts about “how to prevent nosebleeds in autumn” to parents.
“I have to let my child to go back to school to catch up the classes now,” a parents’ representative surnamed Chen, told China Youth Daily. Most students at the school are from outside Shanghai. Their families bought nearby apartments or struggled to obtain the local household permit credits to send them to the school.
Potentially hazardous materials include benzene, toluene and xylene, free toluene diisocyanate, as well as dissoluble lead, cadmium, chrome and mercury, which could lead to nosebleeds, coughs, dizziness and other illnesses, said Shi Jianhua, an expert who helped write national standards on artificial surfaces.
The glues and other additives that are used while paving the tracks could also be harmful to children, he added.
The city’s quality watchdog issued a local standard to regulate artificial tracks in April, after a spate of incidents across China in which children became ill after breathing noxious fumes.
“The standards can hardly protect the children from those toxic plastic running tracks,” said a professor who has been studying plastic track materials for more than two decades, but who asked not to be named.
The standards have many clauses that are too theoretical and irrational and must be amended to be truly effective, the professor told Shanghai Daily by phone.
China’s Education Ministry said officials across the nation have inspected more than 68,000 tracks this year and removed 93 that failed to meet standards.
Two kindergartens in Shanghai’s Songjiang and Minhang districts and four schools in neighboring Jiangsu Province reported their new artificial tracks had led to nosebleed, skin rashes and other symptoms in some students in September last year. In the latest case, all 2,000 students at a new primary school in Chengdu in Sichuan Province were moved back to their old school after about 90 students suffered nosebleeds and rashes and complained of strong odors from their new track.
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