News — The recently that the Italian government was at least partially responsible for the environmental hazards and health risks associated with the “Land of Fires” affected by illegal dumping of chemical waste in the region of Naples and Campania in southern Italy.
“The European Court’s ruling is an unequivocal indictment: the Italian State has abandoned its citizens, allowing the Land of Fires to become an open-air gas chamber. For years, those who should have intervened pretended not to see, downplayed, promised and then looked the other way, while people got sick and died,” says Antonio Giordano, M.D., Ph.D., Founder and Director of the Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO) and Professor at Temple University.
“Now, Europe has clearly said what science has been denouncing for years: this is a silent massacre and the State has serious responsibilities. This is no longer the time for excuses, postponements, the usual political ballets, promises and slogans. Health is not a luxury, it is a constitutional right and those who sit in the institutions have the duty to protect it with facts and not just words. Serious cleanups, real checks, severe penalties for those who have poisoned our land and our lives,” Giordano says.
Giordano was the first to denounce the phenomenon of the land of fires in an investigative book: “Monnezza di Stato: le terre dei fuochi nell'Italia dei veleni” (State Rubbish: the Lands of Fires in the Italy of Poisons) in which, among other things, he described the results of the scientific project “Veritas” with which he highlighted the high concentration of metals such as cadmium, mercury, arsenic, lead in the blood of cancer patients living in Giugliano, one of the municipalities that symbolize the environmental devastation of North Naples.
“If we don’t act today, tomorrow there will be another sentence, and then another. But every day of delay is measured in human lives. Today the Italian Government has a great opportunity for redemption, demonstrating that it is on the side of the citizens and not an accomplice to the greatest environmental and health disaster in our history. There is no more time. There is no more tolerance for inaction,” concludes Giordano.
About the Sbarro Health Research Organization
The Sbarro Health Research Organization () is non-profit charity committed to funding excellence in basic genetic research to cure and diagnose cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and other chronic illnesses and to foster the training of young doctors in a spirit of professionalism and humanism. To learn more about the SHRO please visit .
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