Pollution report view explained

Press, 10 April 1987, Page 9

Pollution report view explained

The Health Department will explain its dissociation from a recent report claiming air pollution could cause death and illness.

According to Christchurch’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr Bill Malpress, a 12-page study of the report, “Air Pollution in Christchurch — How Much Is Too Much?” should be released within the next fortnight. When the pollution report was released by the Canterbury United Council on April 1 the department was quick to dissociate itself from it.

According to Dr Malpress, the report was full of inconsistencies.

The department planned to release a detailed, but easy to understand, study showing why

it rejected the findings of the C.U.C.-commissioned report, he said. “The regional pollution control scientists have gone through the report very carefully and, basically, what we have decided to do with what they have said about it is condense it into something smaller.

“There is a lot of criticism about the C.U.C. report.

“There were a lot of criticisms that we put before the authors of the report earlier that they just haven’t touched at all,” Dr Malpress said. The department’s study would be a critical appraisal of the study, and mainly the last 12 pages in it which suggested pollution in Christchurch was a cause of death and

illness. The department was attacked by several parties for its criticism of the report, written by Dr Graeme Scott and Ms Lee Newman, of University of Canterbury’s resource management centre. But Dr Malpress believed the department’s scientists looked at the report in depth and considered it to be misleading and based on incorrect information. “We made it quite clear that we would dissociate ourselves from the report when the first draft was published and the authors failed to make changes we suggested,” he said. He said the department’s study of the report would provide a rational appraisal of Dr Scott and Ms Newman’s report and

explain why the department rejected its claims. “We will try to get the whole thing into layman’s language but with the right mathematics so that a statistical point of view can go beyond the written word.

“People will be able to see why the department dissociated itself and why we turned the report down as not being representative of the true situation.”

He said the Scott-New-man report did not equate its statistics with epidemiological and biological changes in the community.

It was therefore open to strong criticism. “The report just does not make sense at all and is of no significance. It says, for instance, that

New Zealand has the second-highest rate of bronchitis in the world.

"But it ignores the simple fact that Britain has the highest level and there were more people born in Britain who emigrated to New Zealand than from any other country.

“It is really unreasonable to talk in terms of pollution affecting health — and to say death from pollution has occurred within the last 20 years,” he said.

Dr Mhlpress countered a claim of the report that smoke levels in the atmosphere were increasing and that open fires were the cause by saying that departmental figures indicated that smoke and sulpher dioxide levels were actually decreasing.