The headlines were chilling: hundreds of students sickened, some diagnosed with cancer. In eastern China, a classroom tragedy is playing on the twin anxieties of parents across the nation: pollution and education.

Nearly 500 students at a school campus constructed near the former site of several chemical plants in east China’s Jiangsu province have come down with health problems ranging from bronchitis to eczema to -- in some cases -- lymphoma and leukemia, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Sunday.

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