Health Effects of Air and Water Pollution

Our plain-English summary of Health Effects of Air and Water Pollution, by B.W. Carnow, M.H. Lepper (1968).

The study

• Authors: B.W. Carnow, M.H. Lepper
• Published: Industrial Medicine and Surgery, April 1968. Delivered at the National Health Forum in Chicago on March 20-22, 1967
• Type of article: Journal article
• Our copy: from Johns-Manville's own medical library. The article is still under copyright, so we describe it here rather than post it.

In plain English

This article was a narrative overview of what was then known about the health effects of air and water pollution. It was delivered as a talk at the National Health Forum in Chicago in March 1967. It reported no new study of its own, and the findings it described came from earlier reports. On air pollution, the authors described fatal smog episodes, including the 1952 London episode, with an estimated 6500 excess deaths over a ten-day period. They also described studies linking higher pollution with respiratory illness, and over 700 cases of severe intractable asthma among American military personnel in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. Asbestos appeared only once, in a sentence noting that lung cancer had been found related to exposure to nickel, chromates, asbestos and other industrial inhalants. The authors called these highly localized forms of pollution. On water, they described fish kills and outbreaks of hepatitis and gastroenteritis traced to contaminated shellfish and water. The authors concluded that acceptable pollutant levels must be set from the levels at which the most susceptible organisms are seriously affected, and that further study of long-term health effects was needed.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Narrative review (a lecture summarizing earlier published reports); no original data
• Who was studied: No study population; the article reviewed earlier reports on smog episodes, pollution-related illness, lung cancer, and water-borne disease outbreaks
• Exposure: Air pollutants (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen compounds, carbon monoxide, ozone, lead, hydrocarbons, radioactive materials) and water pollutants (sewage, industrial waste, agricultural runoff). Asbestos was mentioned only once, among industrial inhalants related to lung cancer.
• Main results:
  • Cited from earlier reports, not this paper's own data: in the 1952 London episode an estimated 6500 excess deaths occurred over a ten day period
  • Cited from an earlier report: over 700 cases of severe intractable asthma were found among American military personnel stationed in the Kanto Plain (Tokyo-Yokohama area)
  • Cited from earlier literature: lung cancer had been found related to exposure to nickel, chromates, asbestos and other industrial inhalants, which the authors described as highly localized forms of pollution
  • Cited from Eastcott's study: a 30% higher incidence of bronchogenic carcinoma in cigarette smokers who migrated from Great Britain to New Zealand
• The authors' conclusion: The authors concluded that, beyond a certain dose rate, the natural cleansing mechanisms of air and water break down. Standards for acceptable pollutant levels should be based on the levels at which the most susceptible organisms are seriously affected, and further study of mechanisms and long-term health effects is needed.
• Limitations the authors state:
  • The authors stated that the mechanism of action of many pollutants on the respiratory tract was still poorly understood (a limit of the knowledge reviewed, not of a study of their own)

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Lung Cancer, Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH).

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