[Managing the difficult balance between employment needs and public health in large industrial sites]

Environmental pressures affecting Taranto area led institutional commitment to the local Health (LHA) and Environment Agency, which have helped to provide data in support of epidemiological and health impacts evidence.This is relevant in view of the issues related to the public health which led the Apulia Region to enact measures for environmental monitoring of dioxins (Regional Law 44/2008) and protection of food safety (Regional Council Deliberation 1442/2009). The LHA investigated three lines of development: monitoring of food matrices, studies of human biomonitoring and the establishment of local Cancer Registry. Same time to the actions of the Taranto Judiciary, Apulia Region has enacted the RL 24/12, integrating the legislative gap present into the Environmental Authorization procedures, which will allow the Health Damage Assessment, through the correlation between environmental monitoring data, biomonitoring and Cancer Registry. The next step will see the LHA involved in managing effective and feasible prevention initiatives. The Special Health and Environment Plan objective is to monitor the Taranto population health status, to screen the health determinants, to estimate the toxicologically relevant indicators of possible contamination and, if possible, to modify the correlations between risk factors, body burden, and specific diseases.