Deadly Legacy Of Pollution Feared

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31412, 4 July 1967, Page 12

Deadly Legacy Of Pollution Feared

by

HAROLD M. SCHMECK, Jr.)

WASHINGTON.

Americans produce a substantial share of the world’s goods and, according to a recent report, more than half of the world’s trash.

Our civilisation is the most affluent and the most complex iq the world’s history. The benefits of this in terms of comfort, health, good food and sanitation, rapid transportation, and instant communication are obvious. Few Americans would wish to turn back from these fruits of industry and technology. But many are becoming concerned over the price—increasing contamination of air, water and land; a ceaseless erosion of a continent’s natural environment Part of the price of this is obvious in the noise, dirt, and congestion of cities, the smell of polluted air and the sick appearance of streams that have become open sewers.

Balance Of Nature

Another part of the price, however, is less obvious: The cumulative effects of all this on human health and on the intricate balance of nature'on which all life depends. “It is entirely possible that the biological effects of these enviromental hazards, some of which reach man slowly and silently over decades or generations, will first begin to reveal themselves only after their impact has become irreversible,” said a task force report to John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare recently. This very uncertainty contributes to the worry among many biologists, medical scientists and public health workers. Many persons, including the task-force members, believe the uncertainty.

Proof Of Safety The task force, appointed by Mr Gardner about six months ago to advise the department on how to cope with man’s increasing power to foul the environment, submitted 34 recommendations to the department. Ten were for immediate programmes to achieve sharp abatement of pollution and stringent safeguards against unknown hazards from new products. Industrial smokestack and car and truck exhaust emissions would be cut. 90 per cent within a few years. No new synthetic substance would be marketable after 1970 without some proof of safety. Cither recommendations were for setting up a national environmental protection system to look at pollution not piecemeal but as a whole, and to deal with new hazards as they arise. It was estimated that about half of the task force’s proposals would require new legislation.

Carrying Disease There is plenty of evidence that severe pollution is bad. Contaminated water can carry disease —typhoid fever, for example. Outbreaks of hepatitis have been traced to shellfish taken from contaminated seashore areas. Fish have been killed in many of the nation’s major waterways by industrial or agricultural chemicals.

Some of the famous episodes of severe air pollution are sobering. Seventeen deaths occurred in one day in Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948 during a severe air pollution episode that made nearly half of the town’s 14,000 residents ill. Sixty deaths were attributed to the poisonous pollutionladen air that hung over the Meuse Valley in Belgium from December 1 to 6 in 1930.

Public health specialists in London estimated that 4000 more deaths than would normally have been expected followed a siege of “killer smog” during five days in December, 1952.

No One Ingredient At a Senate hearing several weeks ago Dr. Willian H. Stewart, Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, called air pollution a “health challenge of the first magnitude confronting the American people today.” Seldom can the ill effects of environmental pollution be traced to any one specific agent. More often the result seems to stem from a combination of ingredients all coming close together upon a person who may already be weakened by some chronic condition. Animal experiments have shown that sulphur dioxide—a common pollutant—can increase the labour of breathing, a potentially dangerous thing for a person with heart disease. Other chemicals known to have a cancer-caus-ing potential have been detected as traces in polluted air, but aside from acute poisonings no-one has ever been able to pinpoint any single air pollution ingredient as the cause of any single human illness.

Complex Soup The victims in the Meuse Valley and Donora noticed that their eyes watered, that they coughed and were short of breath, but they were exposed to a complex soup of pollutants all of which presumably had some effect. The deaths were mostly among the aged and infirm. Even when the effects of cigarette smoking are balanced out of the picture, the lung cancer death rate among

city dwellers is 25 per cent higher than in the rural population, Dr. Stewart said in his recent testimony. Common colds and other upper respiratory infections occur more often during high levels of pollution. This has been documented in Maryland, Detroit, and In Britain, Japan and the Soviet Union. But these illnesses are all caused by viruses and the complex circumstances that make them more common during pollution episodes are o)> scure.

Study Urged The task force also noted some of the subtle relationships that may well make pollution dangerous in unexpected ways. In our modern society, for example, it is essential that vehicles have efficient braking systems, but good brake linings contain asbestos. Scientists have found evidence hinting that just a little airborne asbestos dust getting into the lungs can—after many years—produce lung cancer. The number of different chemical substances produced for our needs and convenience is in the hundreds of thousands. For most of these safety is presumed, probably with justification, but not proved. Some scientists believe noise and congestion themselves are harmful pollutants and there is some animal evidence to support this idea, but no hint as to what might be the desirable upper limits for man. The six-person task force headed by Ron M. Linton, a former Senate aide, has added its voice to those who are urging that man’s pollution of his environment be studied as a whole and, wherever possible, abated for the good of the present, and future, generations. Copyright, 1967. “New York Times."