Medicine: Air Attack

One day ten years ago a heavy fog invaded Donora, Pa. (pop. 14,000), was soon reinforced by smoke and dust particles from the hustling community’s furnaces and fires. For almost a week, residents breathed the polluted air. By the time fresh winds came to the rescue, half of them were ill, 20 had died. “It could happen again,” was the point that a handful of experts recently made clear on Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV.

Produced at the request of Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney, the half-hour program (Public Enemy) used facts and figures collected in 200 localities to show that air pollution may hasten death. “Out of every 100,000 people living on farms and in small towns, fewer than 15 will die of cancers in the respiratory system,” said Dr. Richard A. Prindle, head of the U.S. Public Health Service’s Air Pollution Medical Program. But in smogtowns “the death column doubles.”

While air pollution is not pinpointed as the sole cause of increase in these death rates, it does affect “almost everyone and everything in eight principal ways: health, irritation, nuisance, soiling, corrosion, reduced visibility, damage to plants and damage to animals.” For example, said Vernon MacKenzie, engineering chief of the air pollution program, auto fumes contain “well over 100 separate compounds, and some of these can later react in air to produce still other substances.” This may be one reason why city v. country charts of disease rates show dramatic contrasts.

A National Conference on Air Pollution meets this week in Washington. Open to the public, the conference was called by Surgeon General Burney in the hope that “ten years from now, the people in every community will be breathing air that is clean and wholesome.”