In the waiting room of doctor Iván Silva’s medical centre, Nadia Saavedra and her husband Claudio sit quietly as their three-year-old son Pablo attends his regular physiotherapy session.
When Pablo was a year old, they began noticing he wasn’t developing like other children his age. He didn’t speak and couldn’t maintain eye contact. Tests confirmed their fears: Pablo had severe autism.
“The dreams, the expectations you have for your child – all of that is shattered,” said Claudio. “But I still hold onto hope that one day I’ll wake up and hear him say ‘dad,’ or ‘I love you’.”
Pablo is among a growing number of children diagnosed with autism to have come through the doors of Silva’s practice in the city of Calama, in the heart of Chile’s copper mining region of Antofagasta.
Like other medical professionals, the 71-year-old paediatrician suspects this worrying trend is linked to pollution from the vast open-pit copper mines that dominate this region in northern Chile – the world’s top producer of copper, a metal key to global electrification and the clean energy transition.
“When I started, I’d see one or two cases of autism a month. Today, it’s one per day, and the severity of the autism has increased,” Silva, the regional director of the Chilean Medical Association, told Climate Home News. Genetic conditions, respiratory and skin issues are also becoming more common among his younger patients, he said.
Silva is part of a group of medical practitioners raising the alarm about soaring numbers of children in the region being born with severe autism and neurodivergent conditions.
Environmental factors have been found to influence the onset and severity of autism, and medical professionals have called for more research into the impacts of copper mining on the health of local people, especially pregnant women and children. But lack of funding and limited access to laboratory facilities have so far thwarted efforts for comprehensive research.
“The state doesn’t want to know what’s happening here,” said Silva. “There’s no intention to investigate whether what we’re seeing is linked to mining. There are no research institutes, almost no universities involved and not enough doctors in Calama.”
