THE GOVERNMENT’S Technical Committee meets tomorrow to review a British medical team’s urging the state to close a foundry the team said has poisoned the villagers of Ergates with lethal smoke toxins, Government Spokesman Michalis Papapetrou said yesterday.
The seven-doctor British team, in a report handed last Friday to Health Minister Frixos Savvides, urged “in the strongest possible terms” that the state close the Marios & Andreas foundry “with immediate effect”, as it would be “dangerous to the public health of Ergates” to reopen it.
The foundry has been closed on orders of the Council of Minster for the duration of the British tests. Savvides, without commenting on the report, gave it to the Technical Committee. After reviewing it, the committee will forward it to the Council of Ministers — which commissioned the study that produced the report — in time for the Council’s meeting on November 22, Papapetrou said.
The report said the British doctors found “compelling evidence of a serious health problem in Ergates, with raised blood-lead levels in almost 10 per cent of very young children”.
This contrasted with no raised blood-lead levels in children in nearby Klirou, which has no foundry pollution, the report noted.
In Ergates, nearly seven per cent of children between one and 11 years old had blood-lead levels above the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) danger point. Nearly 10 per cent of Ergates’ children of one to five years of age had lead-poisoning above the WHO-CDC danger point, the report said – double the US percentage for children that age.
Lead breaches the placenta barrier, damaging brain, nerves and kidneys of infants in the womb, and human reproductive systems in general. It also lowers child IQ levels, making learning hard and delinquency likely. The British doctors also found the Ergates death rate to be six percentage points above the Cyprus national average, and noted Ergates’ residents had three times the number of fatal heart attacks as in Klirou.
Deaths were 25 per cent higher in Ergates than in Klirou among people in their 70s, and 50 per cent higher among Ergates octogenarians than in Klirou, the report said.
The doctors also found “significantly higher” rates of low birth-weight in Ergates, compared with Klirou. This low birth-weight, they said, “is of serious concern to future child health in the village”.
All in all, the report concluded, “there is overwhelming evidence that toxic pollutants and lead have adversely affected the health of Ergates”.
The doctors said their “main recommendation, therefore, is that the Government of Cyprus should close the foundry with immediate effect”.
The Marios & Andreas foundry tried to upgrade what the experts described as “very old” furnaces and other equipment. They noted there was evidence that a ‘scrubber’ – a device which cleans toxins from chimney emissions – was inoperable, adding that “a vital component had been replaced only recently”. “With the scrubber inoperable, levels of fine (toxic) particulate matter in the emissions from the foundry would have been 20 times higher than is currently permissible in the European Union,” the report noted. Cyprus is already having trouble meeting EU environmental guidelines in its attempt to become an EU member.
The Cabinet ordered the British study of Ergates after local epidemiologist Dr Michalis Voniatis showed the residents had five-times the blood-cadmium and nearly three times the blood-lead as Nicosia residents. He also found brain, kidney and pancreas cancer rates in Ergates nearly three times the Cyprus average, lung cancer 50 per cent higher than the Cyprus average; and leukaemia cases double than in the rest of the island.
Savvides pledged a year ago to close the Ergates foundry “if there is any remote connection with any serious disease emanating out of the foundry”. He made the comment a day after schoolchildren in Omonia, outside Limassol, were hospitalised after being overcome by toxins in smoke from the nearby Nemitsas foundry.
The same British team that undertook the Ergates study has tendered to do a similar one – which Savvides agreed to – in Omonia about the Nemitsas foundry’s toxic effects on nearby residents. But unexplainable Tender Board delays have prevented awarding the winning bid, and Omonia residents are angry and suspicious at the delays. The ultimate decision on whether or not to heed the recommendations and close one or both of the foundries rests with the Council of Ministers.
