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in point of time tended to reduce its impact for, to a boy
or girl of 15, to talk of what may happen in 30 or 40 years
time is somewhat akin to a voyage into eternity. However,
this particular form of health education must continue, and
teachers as well as doctors and health visitors have their
responsibilities, particularly when one bears in mind the
seductive advertisements on television and in the Press which
are designed to inculcate, in the adolescent mind, the impression
that smoking is a sign of emancipation and growing
up and stepping-stone to social ease and acceptance.
In considering lung diseases in general and perhaps
chronic brochitis in particular, one must not forget that the
abatement of atmospheric pollution is one of the most important
tasks facing both central and local government at
the present time. In a way this problem is comparable in its
complexity with the cleaning up of urban water supplies in
the 19th century and just as important. The Clean Air Act,
1956 grants, among its many provisions, permissive power
to local authorities to declare smoke control areas in which
only smokelesss fuels will be burnt in suitable boilers and
domestic heating appliances. In Bexley a beginning has
been made, the Council having authorised a pilot survey to
be carried out in a selected area with a view to obtaining
reliable information as to the cost of replacing unsuitable
appliances and adapting others to make them capable of
burning smokeless fuels. It took over 50 years to provide a
clean and safe water supply to the great towns thus ridding
the population of such diseases as cholera, typhoid and
dysentery. By sustained and determined action in regard
to clean air one may similarly see, in years to come, a reduction
in lung diseases which are responsible for so much
mortality and ill-health, as well as the removal from the
atmosphere of pollution which causes much unnecessary
work for the harassed housewife and does untold damage to
vegetation and the fabric of buildings. We have now installed,
in the Health Department, a volumetric apparatus for
the daily estimation of sulphur dioxide (one of the most
lethal constituents of smoke) and figures are being collected
which will serve as a guide to future action in regard to
smoke abatement.
It is unfortunate, to say the least of it, that the time
when the prevention of atmospheric pollution is becoming
a matter of major policy should coincide with the introduction
of yet another serious hazard from nuclear and
allied radiations resulting from the peaceful uses of atomic
energy in industry including the use of x-rays and of radioactive
isotopes and from international efforts to build up
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