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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Opinion -> 
Good health, the greatest asset
    2015-04-20  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

    Wu Guangqiang

    jw368@163.com

    FEW people noticed the passage of a significant day: World Health Day, a global health awareness day celebrated every year on April 7 under the sponsorship of the World Health Organization (WHO). The theme for 2015 is Food Safety.

    The little public attention to the global event reflects general ignorance of the importance of good health.

    Despite the common sense that says happiness is nothing more than good health, the most common mistake among regular folks is that health is not valued until sickness comes.

    The death of 36-year-old Zhang Bin, an IT engineer with a tech company in Shenzhen, sounded a fresh alarm on the state of the public’s general health, especially among the young.

    A graduate with a master’s degree from Tsinghua University, Zhang was working on a computer program in cooperation with Huawei Technologies before his sudden death on March 24 in the bathroom of a hotel room. The real cause of his death is subject to a scientific examination, but all the prima facie evidence showed that he died from overwork.

    His heartbroken wife, who was left behind with a 6-month-old child, told the media that her husband often worked past midnight. He was even known to have worked until 6 a.m. before going to the office to begin another workday.

    WeChat and email records showed Zhang often discussed software development in the early morning and grabbed a bite at KFC. During this year’s weeklong Spring Festival, Zhang only took a three-day rest. The day before Zhang’s death, he reportedly had told his mother that he was exhausted.

    Another example of declining health among the populace is more personal to me: my sister’s son was just diagnosed with tongue cancer. This nephew of mine, only 33 years old, is also an IT engineer, working for a Zhejiang-based tech company.

    For years, I had been reminding my sister of the necessity to urge her son to take care of his own health, as I had been worried about the way he worked and lived.

    In charge of the software department for his company, he is up to his ears in work all year round. Working and living in different cities, he has to get up early in the morning to rush to work only to return home after dark. Overtime work is routine. To make things worse, he hardly exercises. In his early 30s, he is already bald and keeps complaining of fatigue.

    My nephew has just had a successful surgery and hopefully he will recover well.

    These two cases are just a drop in the bucket — the overall picture is more disturbing. It’s estimated that about 600,000 people die from overwork nationwide every year, and most of them are young people. White-collar workers, such as IT engineers, journalists and executives, belong to a high-risk group.

    

    The inescapable rat race, sleep deprivation, lack of physical exercise, all these factors conspire to take a toll on young people’s health. According to a survey, 90 percent of white-collar workers in first-tier cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, are suffering from sub-health problems, that is, they are on the verge of contracting a serious illness.

    Protecting citizens’ health brooks no delay! China is experiencing a major demographic structure change characterized by a rapid decline in the young and working population. No investment is better than one in the younger generation, and no asset is more valuable than the good health of today’s youths.

    As we can see in the tragedy of Zhang Bin, his employer simply used him as a regular laborer, completely ignoring his rights of health and well-being.

    Only by strictly enforcing existing laws and introducing new legislation on labor protection can the issue be addressed properly. For instance, Japan has categorized death from overwork as an industrial injury and covers it with compensation and insurance; there is no such law in China.

    All Chinese employers must be obliged to buy health insurance for their employees and give them reasonable compensation when employees die or are injured at work.

    More importantly, everyone must care about his or her own health!

    (The author is an English tutor and freelance writer.)

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