Re: Deaths from fossil fuel burning air pollution

["ruth_weiner" <ruth_weiner@email.msn.com>]

"Harmful to health" is quite different from "prospective death."  Neither I
nor anyone else has said that air pollutants, inhaled in enough quantity,
are not harmful.  Of course they are.  SO2 inhalation is  known to be fatal,
but NOT IN THE CONCENTRATIONS IN AMBIENT AIR referred to in the Pope et al
paper.  Because apparently I did not make myself clear, let me give an
analogy:  I have inhaled bromine in the laboratory.  It is corrosive, it
hurt, I choked, I got some fresh air.  It damaged my respiratory tract, but
not permanently.  This was about 30 years ago, and it has had no lingering
effect at all.

My statement was that excess deaths appear to occur in those whose
respiratory systems are already somewhat compromised.  I did NOT say or
imply that damaging respiratory systems was OK, or that only people with
compromised respiratory systems were HARMED by breathing some pollutants.
Harm one can recover from (unlike death).

There is also, by the way, no evidence that inhalation of small
concentrations of air pollutants "builds up" and that there is a cumulative
effect.  To reiterate (since I seem to have been unclear, or at least
misinterpretable):  "Harm" is not "prospective death."  I never discussed
harm, only the notion that a putative, not very good correlation between
mortality and pollution in some areas can be used to predict deaths, or that
this fuzzy correlation identifies "particulate and sulfate air pollution" as
a cause of death.

Aren't some doses of ionizing radiation harmful without causing death?
Isn't that why we treat cancer with radiation?



Ruth Weiner
ruth_weiner@msn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Bernard L Cohen <blc+@pitt.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Thursday, December 07, 2000 7:43 AM
Subject: Re: Deaths from fossil fuel burning air pollution


> All of the discussion by doubters leads me to ask some questions:
> 1. Why do you think air pollution from fossil fuel burning is
>not harmful to human health? There is a very large literature documenting
>this harm-- do you believe it is all flawed? Are you familiar with
>this literature?
> 2. Isn't it just common sense to
>believe that noxious and corrosive materials inhaled can be harmful? Can
>you cite any studies that show that this air pollution is not harmful to
>health? When you say that it is only harmful to people with degraded
>respiratory and cardiovascular systems, what do you think caused these
>systems to become degraded?
> 3. If you believe that fossil fuel burning is not much more
>harmful to human health than nuclear power, why do you favor nuclear
>power?
>
> Bernard L. Cohen
>Physics Dept.
>University of Pittsburgh
>Pittsburgh, PA 15260
>Tel: (412)624-9245
>Fax: (412)624-9163
>e-mail: blc+@pitt.edu
>
>
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