Second assignment - Minamata disease

I hope this fits the criteria of the assignment!

Anyway, the source material I'm referring to is an article from the Asian Economic News website, published August 27 2001: "China to learn about Minamata mercury poisoning".

As a result of China's rapid industrialisation and economic growth, they too are repeating what has happened in numerous other regions which have gone through such a rapid change, namely, allowing environmental issues to take a backseat to development. Subsequently, many parts of China are having to deal with mercury and other pollutants being released into the environment at a dangerous rate.

In light of this, the city of Minamata and the Chinese city of Zhangjiagang, "designated as the first environment model city by the Chinese government", promoted an exchange in an attempt to share information on environmental issues, and according to the article, the city of Minamata intends to further this plan in an attempt to help other countries deal with similar poisonings.

Unfortunately I haven't looked much further into the issue to see what resulted of this, or whether these exchanges have spread further across the world, but if there were few good things to come of the Minamata poisoning then this would certainly be one of them. "The mercury poisoning occurred at the height of Japan's economic boom. We would like to tell China not to make that mistake," a Minamata official said.