by Hikoshi Takahashi, El Universal

The good news is that the government has identified 31 sites which are highly contaminated with industrial waste. The bad news is that the real number of sites is vastly higher, in the hundreds, maybe the thousands. Nobody knows the real numbers. There is no national study of the noxious effects on populations living near, or even on top of, toxic waste dumps. However, in the short term, urgent attention is needed in San Luis Potosi, Guanajuato, Chihuahua, Baja California, Sonora, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Zacatecas and the State of Mexico.

Even environmental authorities have no inventory of contaminated sites or damage caused to human populations.

Daniel Chacón Anaya, representative of the Secretariat on the Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) says the official list of 31 sites "only contains the most relevant cases, I'm sure the real numbers are closer to the thousands." The Secretariat readily admits it doesn't have complete information on toxic waste.

"Sometimes the lack of information is fatal," said Chacón Anaya, "We are a poorly informed society on the subject of chemical exposure. Not being informed is as bad as deliberately hiding the reality of risks."

While 31 sites have been classified as "critical," as of yet, no action has been taken to begin clean up. In many cases, nearby communities are not aware that they are in contact with dangerous substances. The sites include dozens of unofficial dumps containing industrial waste, chemicals or used tires, as well as pesticide production plants and abandoned mines.

The technical term for such sites is pasivos ambientales (inactive environments), meaning they are locations that the nation has inherited from companies that saturated the land with contaminants over the course of many years, companies that take no responsibility for damage done.

MEDICAL WASTE

The trailer dripped blood.

The neighbors in Villas de Altamira, Tamaulipas, were drawn to a nearby trailer by the odor of rotting flesh. They say the truck just appeared quietly one morning near their houses, but it took a couple of weeks for the smell to get really bad.

When they opened the truck's container, they were looking upon 13 tons of human remains from a medical center in Tijuana, 2,700 kilometers (1,700 miles) away. This kind of traveling waste appears all over the country.

Each occupied hospital bed generates 1.5 kilos (3 lbs) of bio-hazardous waste daily, according to the Health Secretariat. Multiplied by the number of patients nationwide that translates to 191,000 tons of blood soaked gauze, tissues, medicines, and other bodily fluids daily.

And that's just medical waste. The National Ecology Institute estimates that between 3 and 7 million tons of hazardous waste are generated annually in Mexico.

In addition, there is only one location in the entire country that is certified to manage toxic waste. Located in Mina, Nuevo Léon, the facility can only process waste that is brought to them.

Chacón Anaya says "We have the risky materials distributed across the country, spread in the air, the water, the soil. By not building processing facilities, we put ourselves in the worst of all scenarios: A country where hazardous materials are dumped anywhere."

Mexico assisted the U.S. during the northern neighbor's wars in Vietnam and Korea by producing agent orange the infamous herbicide used to defoliate forests with devastating effects on human populations. The laboratories that produced the chemical were located in some of the most densely populated neighborhoods in Mexico City. Operating licenses were awarded by the federal government to work in the delegation Gustavo A. Madero and close to La Villa.

Experts say that Mexico has taken a big step by acknowledging toxic waste. However, clean up could take decades.

"In Brazil, when hazardous waste was identified officially as a national priority, instead of shrinking, the problem grew," said Jacobo Finkelman, the Mexican representative of the Pan-American Health Organization (OPS). Once officials started the work of systematically registering sites, many more appeared than they had ever imagined.

"Mexico is a pretty developed country with a lot of industry, so it is likely that it also has lots of suspicious sites," remarked Günther Wehenpohl, Mexican delegate for the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ for its German abbreviation). GTZ has worked with the Mexican government over the last four years on assessing environmental problems.

THE HUMAN COST

The effects of exposure to toxins on human health is enough to cause nightmares. For example, damage to the reproductive system, lung or bone cancer, leukemia, brain damage, and heart trouble, are some of the conditions related to toxins.

It has been demonstrated that chemical exposure results in both short and long term health consequences, says epidemiologist Jacobo Finkelman. Long term exposure is of great concern, even with a lower dosage to toxins. "Frequently these effects are not detected in regular medical visits because the symptoms may be difficult to diagnose. Sometimes we only see the outcome after the damage is done: Neurological problems, effects on the immune system, cancer," says Finkelman.

MONEY RULES

In the end, it all comes down to money.

"It's always a question of available funds. If there is no political will, or economic interest in the restoration of a habitat, few are willing to put up the money," says Wehenpohl.

The hard truth is that it is one thing to fund clean up in a populated area like Mexico City, but entirely another to finance clean up in the middle of the desert, far from civilization. A piece of land with potential as a commercial site is much more attractive to investors than a site with no visible economic gains after restoration.

And that is true whether the site is in Mexico, or Brazil, or Germany. "If there is not an economic interest in a site, less costly clean up measures may be implemented. For example, instead of removing toxins entirely, steps could be taken to neutralize or at least reduce the risks," says Wehenpohl.

If money is the question, the answer is that the Semarnat doesn't have enough. Semarnat has a budget of 300 million pesos (US30 million), which is the amount designated from now until the end of 2006.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) works with a sizably larger budget. For the year 2004, the Superfund allocation alone was US2.8 billion, and the total budget was US17.9 billion.

Chacón says, "Right now, with a health dose of optimism, our budget is just enough to clean up three or four sites. We can work wonders with 300 million pesos. What about the rest of the sites? We have to look to the government, to congress to allocate more funds."

It all comes down to money.