A committee comprised of environmental and medical scientists has found that a much higher percentage of people fall ill annually in the Haifa Bay area, despite the fact that the level of pollution in the region falls within globally accepted levels.

The committee, headed by former Environmental Protection Ministry chief scientist Professor Yoram Avnimelech, is set to present its air quality findings taken from local monitoring stations in the coming days.

The panel was appointed some three months ago by Environmental Protection Minister Gideon Ezra.

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The panel ruled that in light of its findings, there is a pressing need to undertake actions to reduce the level of pollution in and around Haifa.

The panel's major conclusion is that the level of air pollution in Haifa falls within the strict, conventional global air pollution standards, including emission levels of sulfur, nitrogen, and the level of ozone.

However, the panel also found that other forms of pollution in the Haifa Bay area are significantly higher than the levels allowed under European and American environmental regulations.

Committee: Cancer rate is 20 percent higher than in other parts of the country"
The committee noted the relative improvement in the quality of air in teh Haifa Bay area. The findings indicated that until the 1980s Haifa suffered from significantly higher levels of pollution than the level accepted in the western world.

Initiatives of the Environmental Protection Ministry and the Haifa District Municipal Association for the Environment led to the improvements in recent years, the panel added.

Nonetheless, the panel stated that the area in and around the Haifa Bay has a severe problem with the rate of residents contracting serious illness, compared with other areas of Israel.

For example, the level of people contracting cancer is between 8 to 20 percent higher than in other places, and the local death rate from cancer is 8 percent higher.

Furthermore, the area has 18 cases of non-Hodgkin's lyphoma for every 100 residents, compared to the national average of 12. The rate of heart attacks is also between 10 to 15 percent higher than the national average.

The committee added that the statistics are not consistent and contain some internal contradictions. For example, there is a higher than average number of people contracting cancer, especially in the area of Kiryat Tivon, although the cancer fatality rate in the area is still the same as the national average.

The statistics on disease contraction and fatality rates are put together from a variety of sources, which are not coordinated in any way. These sources have not been checked to establish their reliability, and they lack details or statistics that can explain the causes of higher disease contraction in the area.

In spite of this, the committee warned against inaction on the issue and called for stronger measures to diminish air pollution.

Recommendation: To enact strict emissions controls
One of the important findings of the committee was that there is a pressing need to enact strict, defined emissions regulations on all of the factories in the area. These regulations would stipulate how much polluting material factories could produce for each ton of products that they create.

In a number of factories in Israel, the amount of pollution is much higher than their counterparts in Europe, with some producing levels of sulphur emissions 1.5 times higher than that of European countries such as Belgium or Holland, and levels of nitrogen emissions nearly double the European average.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Ministry defined the levels of emissions allowed under a standard business license. According to the committee, the findings should be applied to a long period of time, and that whatever environmental regulations are undertaken, they should be enacted for around ten years and should be assisted by industrial experts on the subject.