Stefania Senno was just three years old on July 10 1976. She was playing on a balcony in her family home in Meda, just a few hundred metres (yards) from the Icmesa plant where the explosion occurred.

She was enveloped in the toxic cloud that spread over Meda, Seveso and neighbouring towns and villages, contaminating a region with a population of around 100,000, 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Milan.

A few days later her face became disfigured, and the image of the little girl screaming with pain went around the world, becoming a symbol of the catastrophe.

The inhabitants of Meda knew only that the plant produced perfumes and cosmetics. But the cloud created by the accidental explosion contained dioxin -- a highly toxic chemical that was little known at the time.

No one died as a result of the accident, but 193 people, most of them children, were affected by chloracne, a serious skin disease.

Today Stefania Senno is 33 and lives near Treviso. She has agreed to be photographed by the magazine Gente. Despite four operations, her face still shows the ravages of the dioxin.

It took 10 years to decontaminate the area. Houses were destroyed, and all contaminated material was buried in reinforced concrete.

Nobody has ever been prosecuted over the accident. Six years later the contaminated contents of the factory were removed for incineration in Switzerland. But they went missing en route and were only rediscovered nearly a year later in a disused abattoir in northern France.

The disappearance of the toxic waste was no isolated incident. In 2005 between 350,000 and 400,000 tonnes (385,000 and 440,000 short tons) of dangerous waste vanished into thin air in Italy according to the environmental pressure group Legambiente, which pinned the blame on the Mafia.

The new left-wing government elected in April has set up a commission to investigate waste.

Meanwhile the European parliament is attempting to strengthen its environmental legislation, originally introduced in response to the Seveso disaster.

In June 1982 the so-called "Seveso directive" aimed at getting governments and industry to identify the risks involved in certain chemical activities came into force.

In 1986, a fire at the Sanoz factory in Basel, Switzerland, which seriously polluted the Rhine, led the European Community to harden the legislation with the "Seveso 2" directive, which came into force in February 1999.

Seveso 2 required companies to manage the risks of their activities more rigorously, and applied to the storage as well as the use of dangerous materials.

Now there are moves to introduce a new requirement on manufacturers to replace dangerous materials with safer alternatives.

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