Notes

• "In When Smoke Ran Like Water, the world-renowned epidemiologist Devra Davis vividly confronts the public triumphs and private failures of the public health community’s long battle against environmental pollution. For Davis, the issue is personal: Pollution killed or incapacitated several family members and, in a 1948 smog emergency that became a landmark public health disaster, sickened half her home town of Donora, Pennsylvania. In a riveting series of accounts, she exposes how it is far easier to conduct inconclusive studies of such disasters than to do something about their causes; reveals the true toll of London’s lethal smog of 1952 (12,000 deaths or four times official estimates); shows how the Ethyl Corporation insidiously fought for decades to keep lead in gasoline despite evidence of its hazards; and describes how other major firms have cynically lobbied, cajoled, and manipulated scientists and the government regarding the hazards of toxic chemicals. Davis provides inside accounts of the struggles to find, monitor and restrain environmental causes of breast cancer, damaged genitals of baby boys, the complex sources of global warming, and many other threats. When Smoke Ran Like Water makes a devastating case that our approaches to public health must change."–BOOK JACKET