"BELGRADE - A few hundred meters from the huge furnaces of the Chinese-owned Smedrevo steel mill in central Serbia, the village of Radinac is covered in thick red dust. Cancer rates have quadrupled in under a decade, and residents want the plant to clean up or shut down.
Zoran, 70, a throat cancer patient who speaks with a voice prosthesis after his larynx was removed, said residents must dry their laundry indoors and use vinegar to clean the dust from their cars.
'Water cannot wash it off,' he said. 'We do not go out. We do not dare.'
According to data from the Smederevo public health body, which a watchdog called Tvrdjava obtained through a freedom of information request and shared with Reuters, the municipality of around 100,000 people reported 6,866 cancer cases in 2019, up from 1,738 in 2011."
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