How the mafia is causing cancer

When doctors in rural Italy began to see a surge in cancer cases, they were baffled. Then they made the link with industrial waste being dumped by local crime syndicates. Ian Birrell learns about the tragic consequences.

Afew days before I visited the rather scruffy Hospital of Saint Anna and Saint Sebastian in Caserta, a boy aged 11 arrived complaining of headaches. Doctors feared the worst – and sure enough, the case was rapidly diagnosed as another child with brain cancer. Some of these young patients arrive in agonising pain, others mystified by falling over all the time; they do not know lethal tumours are swelling up inside their heads. Yet more turn up with cancer in their blood, their bones, their bladders. There are so many cases not all can be treated in the hospitals of Campania, a largely rural region of southern Italy.

It was too early to provide a prognosis for the boy with the brain cancer, let alone to offer real comfort to his distraught family. Yet in a town where doctors used to rarely come across a child with cancer, never mind brain cancer, they now see these traumatic cases crop up almost every month. Too many young patients are ending up dead, some barely out the womb but with bodies riddled with disease. Then there are all the women getting breast cancer unusually early, the men with lung cancer despite never smoking, the children born with Down’s syndrome despite the comparatively young age of their mothers.

So why is this happening in an area north of Naples known as the ‘Triangle of Death’? The answer, locals believe, can almost certainly be found in places such as an old quarry three miles away by the historic town of Maddaloni, which I visited with an energetic 57-year-old youth worker named Enzo Tosti. As we drove there, he told me he was having treatment to counter the high levels of dioxins found in his blood five months earlier. “My wife works for the hospital as a radiologist and she is very concerned,” he said. “I thought about leaving for my health and going to live somewhere else, but where would I go? This is my land.”

It was a glorious evening after a rain-sodden day, golden sun dipping through lavender-streaked skies as we turned off the main road and passed an orange grove, then fields full of fledgling bean plants. It was easy to understand his attachment to this striking area of Italy, some of the most fertile land in Europe thanks to the volcanic eruptions of Vesuvius to the south. But for all the natural beauty, the scenes confronting me could not have been more depressing.

As we clambered from the car, Tosti clamped his hand over his mouth and told me to hurry. Rubbish lay everywhere, with plastic sacks, paint containers and glass bottles littering the ground. I stumbled over the undulating land, pockmarked with crevices and potholes, as I struggled to keep up with my guide. Descending one dip we were struck by the acrid stench of chemicals and saw a small plume of smoke seeping from the earth. But Tosti waved away questions. “We can talk in the car,” he said. “Let’s get away from here.”

Reference:

• Legambiente’s reports on waste dumping by criminals, including Enrico Fontana’s first Garbage Inc. report. [In Italian]
• Alfredo Mazza’s 2004 publication in the Lancet, the first of many investigations into the Land of Fires.
• A 2014 study that found significantly higher levels of dioxins in breast milk from mothers in the worst-afflicted areas of Caserta and Naples.
• A 2015 paper that found worrying concentrations of dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in animal milk in Campania.
• The results of the National Institute of Health inquiry into cancer in the Land of Fires, which investigated mortality, cancer incidence and hospital admissions. [In Italian]
• Roberto Saviano’s ground-breaking mafia exposé, Gomorrah.