Do humans take good care of their offspring as animals do ! The Lavreotiki and Lavrion 'sagas', Hellenic Republic-Part 1: Historical outline and mapping of lead contamination.

The Lavreotiki-Lavrion area, situated in the south-eastern tip of mainland Hellas, has one of the longest mining, ore beneficiation and smelting legacies worldwide. With a history of over 5000 years of argentiferous Pb-Zn ore exploitation, Lavrion is a place that shaped human civilisation by being a major wealth producing centre of the ancient world but also represents one of the few significant industrial developments of the modern Hellenic Republic, since the second part of the 19th century. The long history of mining, ore beneficiation and smelting activities produced a vast amount of potentially toxic wastes. In the post-mining era of Lavrion, during the 1980's, cross-sectional epidemiological studies diagnosed a severe problem of blood-Pb poisoning in primary school-age children and highlighted the seriousness of environmental contamination on the health of the local population. The first part of this review deals with the contamination problem in the area with respect to Pb, and discusses the results of detailed geochemical and epidemiological studies, based on the source-pathway-receptor model. The second part of the review presents the holistic evaluation of the contamination hazard, the assessment of health-related risk to residents, and the socio-economical impact of the proposed remediation plan to the local community. The case of Lavrion-Lavreotiki area is a worldwide reference example of the environmental, economical, societal and health-related implications that the thousand-years long legacy of mineral resources exploitation has left behind.

Do humans take good care of their offspring as animals do ! the Lavreotiki and Lavrion 'sagas', Hellenic Republic-Part 2: hazard and risk assessment and remediation.

A number of geochemical and epidemiological studies verified that the Lavrion urban and suburban area is highly contaminated and has affected to a variable degree the health of the inhabitants, presented in the first part of review on the Lavrion 'sagas'. In the second part of this review, emphasis is given to the challenge environmental scientists faced in communicating the scientific results to environmental managers and the public and state officials in order for them to understand the benefits of prioritising public health over wealth. Imminent remediation actions have been developed and proposed in order to secure a healthier life for the local population. The proposed integrated environmental management scheme was based on the findings of hazard and health risk assessment. The aim was not only to remediate the contaminated land, but also to inform the local population and authorities regarding the environmental hazards that they were facing, and the necessary safety measures that should be taken. However, the proposed lifestyle changes were viewed with scepticism from all stakeholders. This paper seeks to provide some answers to questions related to the obstacles that have prevented the implementation of the proposed remediation plan on a large scale by reporting on risk perception and response to scientific evidence by the affected community in Lavrion. It also underlines the significant role of SEGH in linking applied environmental research with the public.