MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chile: Medical leader and Legislators call for stronger action to fight Santiago pollut.

Santiago's environmental situation is “untenable,” said Juan Luis Castro, the president of Chile's medical association, and implored President Michelle Bachelet to seriously address the issue during her term in office.

Speaking live Monday morning on Radio Agricola, Castro said the city's deplorable contamination is worse than most citizens perceive it to be and lamented that the government has failed to take into consideration "bio-medical" indicators when deciding whether or not to invoke an environmental or pre-emergency alert, as has been requested by the nation's physicians during the past ten years. "That's the most striking thing about the paradox we are in, and speaks not only to this government's inability to do anything, but the inability of the previous governments," he said.

Castro's plea for action tracked a request made last weekend by two pro-government political leaders who called for stronger government action to measure and control the capital city's contamination.

Sen. Guido Girardi and Dep. Patricio Vallespin said the government should recalibrate its procedures for measuring pollution to include fine particle contaminants (PM2.5), rather than just the larger PM10s which are currently measured. The legislators insisted that if the PM2.5s were made part of the government's pollution measuring index, then the number of "alert" and "pre-emergency" days declared in the Metropolitan Region would easily double, and citizens would be better protected.

"There is no doubt that Bachelet has inherited this problem, which is now almost a burden, from the previous Concertación governments," added Castro. "The issue isn't as dramatic as the misidentification of the bodies dug up in Patio 29 or the delay in Transantiago, which are a lot more complicated. And the problem here is much more than what President Ricardo Lagos failed to do. Don't forget that this is an issue that goes all the way back to the presidency of Patricio Aylwin, who created the famous ?Decontamination Committee.'"

Last week government officials hinted that cars equipped with catalytic converters may soon be required to stop circulating during "environmental alerts." Currently, driving restrictions on "environmental alert" days are limited to cars without catalytic converters

Dry, warm autumn weather now experienced in Santiago results in thermal inversions in the Central Valley where the capital city is located, leading to a dramatic increase in respiratory disease. Metropolitan Region hospitals report that the incidence of children with respiratory problems increased by 62 percent this past weekend.

By Steve Anderson The Santiago Times - News about Chile