When Smoke Ran Like Water - Hardcover

Davis, Devra; Davis, Devra Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465015212 ISBN 13: 9780465015214

Publisher: Basic Books, 2002

Synopsis

In When Smoke Ran Like Water, the world-renowned epidemiologist Devra Davis confronts the public triumphs and private failures of her lifelong battle against environmental pollution. By turns impassioned and analytic, she documents the shocking toll of a public-health disaster--300,000 deaths a year in the U.S. and Europe from the effects of pollution--and asks why we remain silent. She shows how environmental toxins contribute to a broad spectrum of human diseases, including breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and emphysema--all major killers--and in addition how these toxins affect the health and development of the heart and lungs, and even alter human reproductive capacity.But the battle against pollution is not just scientific. For Davis, it's personal: pollution is what killed many in her family and forced the others, survivors of the 1948 smog emergency in Donora, Pennsylvania, to live out their lives with damaged health. She vividly describes that episode and also makes startling revelations about how the deaths from the London smog of 1952 were falsely attributed to influenza; how the oil companies and auto manufacturers fought for decades to keep lead in gasoline, while knowing it caused brain damage; behind-the-scenes accounts of the battle to recognize breast cancer as a major killer; and many other battles. When Smoke Ran Like Water makes a devastating case that our approaches to public health need to change.

About this title

About the Author

Devra Davis, Ph.D., M.P.H., is the Director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and Professor of Epidemiology, Graduate School of Public Health. She was appointed by President Clinton to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board in 1994 and also served as Scholar in Residence at the National Academy of Science. She works in Pittsburgh, and lives in Washington, D.C. She is married to Richard D. Morgenstern and has two children and two grandchildren.

Reviews

Davis, one of the world's leading epidemiologists and researchers on environmentally linked illness, writes about her lifelong battle against environmental pollution in strong prose, underlined with some horrifying stories. With a special emphasis on air pollution and its long-term effects, Davis anecdotally talks about some of the most infamous smogs and fogs of all time, including the Donora Fog (October 26, 1948) that left a small zinc-factory town in Pennsylvania blanketed in a thick, toxic fog for over a week. "Within days, nearly half the town would fall ill" and within one 24-hour period 18 people had died. She argues that these incidents are underreported because the industries responsible for the pollutants are often powerful corporations or the major employer in these small towns. Research into the long-term effects of pollution, such as breast and testicular cancer, reveals that people in the Northeast (including Long Island and Connecticut) and in California have a higher incidence of serious illnesses. Most importantly, Davis brings to the fore the long-lasting effects of growing up and living in a polluted atmosphere, clearly demonstrating that "people living in areas with the dirtiest air had the highest risk of dying." She sounds the warning bell loud and clear: the threat to public health is real. This is an enlightening, engrossing read (with an intro by Gaynor, a leading oncologist at the Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York City), which should be on the shelf of anyone who cares about the environment and wants to learn more about policy, health and politics; Davis weaves all of these together with grace.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Davis tackles the subject of environmental pollution on two fronts, one personal and one professional. The first contains insight into her own life, starting from her roots in the metalworking town of Donora, Pa.--where the smog from pollution killed 20 outright in October 1948 and had lasting ill effects in townspeople, some fatal, in the months and years that followed. Her vivid descriptions of deadly smog in London as recent as the mid-1950s give the reader perspective about the inherent perils of industrial pollution to the public at large. An epidemiologist by training, Davis also chronicles the growing awareness of the spread of breast cancer (and pollution as a possible cause) in the 1990s, sterility and testicular cancer in men, and the impact of pollution on climate change. Although her prose relies heavily on statistics and historical accounts of pollution, Davis's personal narrative ties the story together nicely.

Editors of Scientific American

Davis is an environmental epidemiologist, and her Pennsylvanian hometown factored into her career choice. Host to a zinc factory, it was smothered by a smog in 1948 that killed about 70 people. Four years later, London was covered by a smog that carried off thousands. From these opening chapters, Davis proceeds to an analytic history of the statistical causation between air pollution and health ailments. Even environmentalists have probably not heard of Mary Amdur, a toxicologist working in the late 1940s who faced this official standard for air pollution: it was nothing to fret over unless it killed a lab animal outright. Amdur's work contributed to the overthrow of this strange threshold, though at some cost, as Davis sympathetically recounts how Amdur was consistently denied tenure. Following a presentation of other scientists' studies and the environmental laws enacted circa 1970, Davis relates her scientific activities on government bodies, and in support of breast cancer research. A balanced treatment of the personal, scientific, and political elements of environmental research. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Epidemiologist Davis documents the struggle to force the auto, oil, coal, and chemical industries to come to terms with the environmental consequences of their unregulated release of toxic substances into our air and water-in particular high cancer rates, heart and lung diseases, infertility, brain damage, and death. She sets the stage by describing the perpetual health problems and deaths in her home town of Donora, PA, caused by toxins from coal, steel, and zinc processing. Her accounts of the devastating black smog that blanketed the town for several days in 1948 and other black smogs in Liege, London, and Los Angeles reveal the global nature of the problem. This is an expos on how industrial polluters deceived the public, belittled scientists and academics, and pressured government agencies to stifle regulations. Davis acknowledges that today's environmental regulations are a tribute to those who fought the polluters and demanded change, but the battle continues. Recommended for all environmental and public health collections; for additonal coverage of this issue, see also Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner's Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution and Sandra Steingraber's Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment.
Irwin Weintraub, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., New York
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465015212
• ISBN 13: 9780465015214
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336