[Risk and causalty in environmental disasters].

A Dossier dedicated to environmental issues is a rare but important event in the history of AI&R. Environmental issues (and even more specific health related risks and severe events with morbidity-mortality outcomes) are hardly, or at best marginally part of the basic training of the medical and nursing professionals. A clear indicator of the otherness of these problems, with respect to the culture and competences which guide routine practice, is the very difficult, and therefore rare, possibility of the use of medical records for the production of timely and/or periodical scientific-epidemiological reports. The Dossier (to be closely linked and integrated with the Editorial, is principally based on two major disasters which have even occupied the national and international chronicles over at least the last few years: the thousands of workers and community victims of asbestos in Casale Monferrato; the area-wide and decades-long exposure to chemical industrial pollution of the workers and population of Taranto. The cases are presented with a combination of narrative testimonies of professionals and lay witness of the two scenarios, and essential epidemiological data, which refer to the original, abundant documents and publications. Because of its critical and specific importance and controversial character, the issue of juridical criminal responsibility is discussed, technically but didactically by an expert who has been directly involved with the cases. Two apparently atypical but, in fact, strictly complementary contributions conclude the Dossier, recalling the need of extending the meaning of environmental variables, on one side to the broader socioeconomic context, on the other to the highly personal (professional and human) experiences met in crossing one of the most described but substantially ignored faces of the diseased cultural and physical environment in the South.