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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s syndrome despite the comparatively young age of their mothers.<\/p>\n
So why is this happening in an area north of Naples known as the \u2018Triangle of Death\u2019? 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. \u201cMy wife works for the hospital as a radiologist and she is very concerned,\u201d he said. \u201cI thought about leaving for my health and going to live somewhere else, but where would I go? This is my land.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cWe can talk in the car,\u201d he said. \u201cLet\u2019s get away from here.\u201d<\/p>\n