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PURE AIR
One hundred years of Public Health effort has produced in England
a people who demand pure water to drink as a fundamental right;
the new Elizabethan era should set out to evolve a generation who will
demand pure air to breathe.
The fog in December provided convincing evidence of the state of
pollution of our atmosphere due to the products of the unsatisfactory
combustion of coal.
The fog affected all ages; children developed coughs, healthy adults
suffered from varying degrees of laryngitis, elderly chronic bronchitics
suffered weeks of invalidism and the death rate in elderly people was
double the normal rate for the two-week period.
The graph on page 22 shows how the numbers of deaths for the period
compares with the average numbers of deaths for the corresponding
weeks of the preceding three years.
Smoke comes from many sources—the ordinary householder produces
most, and the Nationalisation of some of the offending industries
(Railways, Gas and Electricity) has not so far shown an example in
smoke prevention due to economic reasons.
ATMOSPHERIC POLLUTION
The pollution of the atmosphere in a district normally results from
the combustion of coal and its derived fuels. Coal has been used in
this country as a source of heat for at least a thousand years, displacing
wood which became scarce and expensive. The pollution of the London
atmosphere from coal smoke has been a constant cause of complaint
and legislation against it dates back to the reign of Edward I.
With the coming of the industrial revolution and the consequent
increased consumption of coal, the problem became more acute. In
1890, Sir John Simon, Chief Medical Officer, Local Government
Board, wrote:—
"See with what apparent indifference our nineteenth century
England acquiesces in a daily increasing sacrifice of daylight to dirt.
There are immense masses of our population—the inhabitants, for
instance, of London and of many chief manufacturing towns—who
endure without revolt or struggle the extremities of general "Smoke
Nuisance": not only condoning the fact that the nuisance is of
painful injury to an appreciable number of persons, and in certain
states of the weather kills many of them: but further accepting, as
if in obedience to some natural law, that their common life shall in
great part be excluded from the pure light of day by an ignoble pall
of unconsumed soot: and hardly murmuring, in their self-imposed
eclipse, that their persons and clothing and domestic furniture are
under the incessant grime of a nuisance which is essentially removable."
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