Chinese suicide levels linked to pesticides

China could cut its suicide rate in half by keeping pesticides out of the reach of desperate women in the countryside, the official Xinhua news agency said on 31 October, quoting a leading researcher.
    It said official figures recently released showed 250,000 Chinese committed suicide each year. That was 22 people out of every 100,000, more than in affluent Western states like the United States, Canada and Britain, but fewer than in places like Hungary and Lithuania, where the ratio was between 40 and 50 per 100,000, it added. 
    Xinhua quoted Professor Zhai Shutao as saying the Chinese rate could be slashed because those most likely to commit suicide were women in the countryside and they were most likely to use handy pesticides to kill themselves. 
    ‘If poisonous pesticides are strictly controlled, the suicide rate might well be lowered by half nationwide,’ Zhai said. 
    Around 10 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people are believed to be living on less than $1 a day, and many of them are rural women.

Reuters News Service, 1 November 2001.

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 54, December 2001, page 21]