Terra dei fuochi, suspended health: too many people still get cancer here

In Italy, a family doctor, who looks after an average of 1,500 patients, discovers 7-8 new cancer cases among his patients every year. 'I, on the other hand, have 11 new cases every year,' says Dr Luigi Costanzo, from his practice in Frattamaggiore, in the middle of the Terra dei fuochi. There is no more concrete proof than this, of the fact that people in these parts still get cancer from illegal toxic dumps. It's been 12 years that Dr Costanzo has been practising in the province of Naples: 'In all this time,' he says, 'I have seen the average age of cancer patients go down. There are many 40-year-olds with oesophageal tumours, many women with breast tumours already at 35, and peaks of bladder tumours'. Since 2018, some 70 family doctors from the municipalities of the Terra dei fuochi, including Dr Costanzo, have also started Epica, a project to keep track of new cancer patients. In real time, starting from the hospital discharge forms put online by the doctors themselves. And the numbers are dramatic.

Following the Strasbourg court ruling last January, which condemned Italy for failing to sufficiently protect the health of 3 million of its inhabitants from environmental pollution, the Italian government appointed an extraordinary commissioner for the Terra dei Fuochi, General Giuseppe Vadalà, who was given 60 days to draw up a new action plan. His time, to unlock the perimeters of the polluted land and their remediation established by the 2013 Terra dei Fuochi Decree, expires at the end of the month.

The biggest enemy to be defeated is the argument, held by many, that in the last ten years the danger has ceased and there have been no more toxic spills into the ground. The Campania regional government itself makes it known that 'the European Court's condemnation sentence concerns facts and complaints prior to 2013. President Vincenzo De Luca has been governing since 2015 and on waste he has almost wiped out the European fine. Since 2015, dozens of landfill and perimeter reclamations have been carried out, the tumour registry has been reactivated and air, water and land are monitored in real time'.

The cancer registry, however, is stuck in 2018. On the other hand, as proof of Dr Costanzo's data from Frattamaggiore, there are those of the latest Sentieri report of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, that of 2023, which refer to the entire Domizio-Flegreo coastline and the Agro Aversano: 'Over the last forty years, these territories have consistently had the worst numbers in the whole of Italy,' explains Dr. Antonio Marfella, oncologist at the Pascale National Cancer Institute in Naples and consultant for various public prosecutors' offices on the subject of the 'Terra dei fuochi'. 'The Iss says that here the incidence rate of tumours is 9% higher on average.

The truth is that the numbers of sick people remain high because the causes of environmental pollution have never ceased. "The evidence that the spills continued well beyond 2015 can be found both in the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights and in the official statements made by the various prefects to the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on the Terra dei Fuochi," assures lawyer Valentina Centonze. Who speaks with full knowledge of the facts: it was she, together with three other lawyers, who represented the 71 plaintiffs at the Strasbourg court. "The same regional reclamation plan," she adds, "available on the Campania Region website and updated to January 2025, says that there are still 3,000 sites to be reclaimed.