It's moral, not scientific
The heads of the Health and Environmental Protection ministries, as well as the Haifa Municipality, seem to find themselves, time and again, utterly embarrassed in the face of new data leaked to the media. Time and again, data is released after apparent attempts to prevent transparent information from reaching the public.
Had the authorities initiated the release of the report, it could have significantly reduced the public's distrust in the institutions that are supposed to protect its health.
Channel 2 reported on Sunday that a study being conducted by the University of Haifa that found that the average head circumference of infants born in the vicinity of Haifa's most polluted areas was significantly smaller than that of infants born in less polluted areas, as well as new and alarming data about the cancer rates in these areas.
The public's trust in the ministries and in the data they have been collecting, researching and publishing is crucial. Not only does this information maintain the public's health, it also guarantees the support of these ministries when dealing with the polluting factories as well as allocating the resources to fight environmental pollution.
Rebuilding the public's trust is important given the hard blow it suffered less than a year ago, in April 2015, when Health Ministry Director General Professor Itamar Grotto stated that Haifa's air pollution obviously put Haifa's residents, especially children, at a higher risk of cancer
However, embarrassingly enough, it was later discovered that at least some of the data had not been substantiated and was therefore unreliable. The irresponsible report released by the Health Ministry seriously undermined the public's ability to believe the government was really doing everything in its power to minimize the pollution in the Haifa Bay, as well as releasing truthful data.
To rebuild public trust, health and environmental protection authorities must engage in two main courses of action: proactively, responsibly and methodically advertising the studies' data regarding the pollution in Haifa and its connection to the city's residents, and finance further studies, as well as overseeing them professionally.
Additionally, there is a pressing need to finance and operate a national program to reduce industrial pollution in Israel. There is no need to wait for conclusive scientific evidence to make the connection between pollution and congenital anomalies and diseases.
Not only has such evidence proved very difficult to measure scientifically and statistically, it can also take years to reach such findings, if at all.
As former Chief Justice Meir Shamgar concluded when he headed the commission that investigated the link between the pollution in the Kishon River and navy divers' health problems, even if a clear causal-scientific connection between exposure to polluting substances and the outbreak of fatal diseases is not clearly established, there is still a moral, medical and public duty to recognize this correlation.
This recognition is essential to preventing and reducing environmental pollution like the severe pollution in Haifa and its surrounding cities. The sooner this is done, the better.
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