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An 8-year-old girl in Jiangsu Province is the youngest person in China to have received a diagnosis of lung cancer, which a doctor treating her has attributed to air pollution, according to an official news report.

The report, which circulated widely online Tuesday, said the girl had been living near busy streets and inhaling dirty air. The report was first published on Monday by China News Service and reprinted on the website of People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece. It quoted Dr. Feng Dongjie, of Jiangsu Tumor Hospital in Nanjing, where the girl is being treated, as saying that fine particulate matter, known as PM 2.5, could lead to inflammation once it accrues in the lungs and result in malignant changes.

The report did not give the girl’s name or more details of her condition or living situation.

A person who answered the telephone at the hospital on Tuesday afternoon said that Dr. Feng was busy with patients and could not take a call.

The news report said cities in Jiangsu, a relatively wealthy province bordering Shanghai, have been shrouded in haze this month. Many factories sit in the Yangtze River Delta area of Jiangsu, and the area is one of the most polluted outside of northern China.

The report also said lung cancer was the leading form of cancer in China. The fastest growth rate has been among people between 3 and 50 years old, it said. At one hospital in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu, lung cancer patients occupy nearly 50 of 120 beds in the thoracic surgery department. Many of the patients are in their 30s and 40s, and most are not thought to have gotten lung cancer from smoking, the report said.

The World Health Organization said last month that it was classifying air pollution and the particulate matter that it contains as major carcinogens. “Our conclusion is that this is a leading environmental cause of cancer deaths,” Christopher P. Wild, the director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is under the W.H.O., said at a news conference in Geneva.

Lung cancer is the most common cancer worldwide and accounts for 1.3 million deaths per year. It is the leading cancer killer among men and women in the United States, according to the American Lung Association. It causes more deaths than the next three most common cancers combined, those being colon, breast and prostate cancer.

Earlier this year, several scientific reports raised alarms about the staggering damage caused by air pollution to the health of Chinese citizens. One report, based on data from the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study, said that outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, which was nearly 40 percent of the total number of premature deaths around the globe attributed to air pollution. In July, a study published by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a prominent American journal, concluded that the heavy use of coal-based heating north of the Huai River in China had shortened the life spans of Chinese living there by an average of five years.

This year, levels of PM 2.5 have become a major source of anxiety for many Chinese, especially those living in cities in northern China, which, because of the prevalence of coal-based industries and power generation, suffer from the worst air pollution in the country. Propaganda officials loosened restrictions on reporting by the Chinese news media on air pollution after an outcry last January over the “airpocalypse,” a period when PM 2.5 concentrations in northern China surged to record levels. Parts of Beijing had nearly 1,000 micrograms of PM 2.5 per cubic meter, which is 40 times the exposure level considered safe by the World Health Organization. Last month, the northeastern city of Harbin, which has a population of 11 million, recorded similar levels over several days. The city shut down schools and ordered buses off the roads, where visibility was reduced to a few meters.

At 7 p.m. on Tuesday, as thick smog cloaked the office towers of central Beijing, the United States Embassy recorded PM 2.5 levels of 254, which contributed to an Air Quality Index of 304, rated “hazardous.” Residents across northern China are bracing for pollution to worsen in the coming weeks, as cities turn on their central heating systems. Official news reports said the switching on of Harbin’s system contributed to the spate of hazardous-air days there last month. Most or all of the central heating systems in Beijing buildings are scheduled to be switched on by Nov. 15.

Shi Da contributed research.