When Smoke Ran Like Water - newsbites - Book Review

Better Nutrition, March, 2003

On October 26, 1948, a fog suddenly blanketed a small town in Pennsylvania. Within hours, the lungs of some residents of tiny Donora had turned to bloody pulp. Eighteen people living downwind died within three days. And after the fog of sulfur and fluoride gases had lifted a week later, another 50 people had died. Hundreds more suffered permanently damaged lungs and hearts. Yet local political and business pressures kept the story quiet.

Then, four years later, smog descended on London, England--killing 7,000. Another half century passed before the whole truth about these and other industrial pollution disasters began to make public health history.

Epidemiologist Devra Davis grew up in Donora--and her explosive new book, When Smoke Ran Like Water, is a passionate expose of industry's long history of deception and denial.

From her insider's view, Davis tells a compelling story of the cause of Donora's tragedy and official attempts to keep it quiet. This engrossing read, from Basic Books, also includes a riveting account of how--and why--the UK government lied to its citizens, attributing the deaths to influenza.

Through these--and other--stories, Davis documents a familiar pattern: When solid science implicates a toxin, industry hires experts to bury and block the studies.

Even the respected British medical journal The Lancet has bowed to pressure to exclude several of these studies.

If you want to grasp the root cause of the growing rates of breast cancer, male infertility and over a million early North American deaths in the past 20 years alone, When Smoke Ran Like Water is a must-read. After all, straight talk about the extensive link between health and industrial pollution is rare indeed.