Still no reported deaths in this natural experiment.
“The Beijing Shijitan Hospital received 20 percent more patients than usual at its respiratory health department, most of them coughing and seeking treatment for bronchitis, asthma and other respiratory ailments,” Dr. Huang Aiben said.” [HeraldOnline]
Plaintiff’s Attorney’s: You’re missing the opportunity of a lifetime
This is a press release from an environmental services company.
There was a similar uptick in London in 1952, which gave rise to some of today’s most odious political movements. But the problem was eventually solved, with them or without. In 2000, London was still visibly and olfactibly more polluted than the American cities of comparable size. Today it is quite on par with Chicago, I’d say, and that means one can live in the town centre without becoming a respiratory case. Not that one would necessarily want to.
No denying, China is quite awful by our standards, but I imagine, much better than London was a century ago. The sinking of the SS Princess Alice and her passengers in a sea of raw sewage is unimaginable today but probably wasn’t totally out of the ordinary back in the day. We simply evolve at different rates.
Mongolia is another prolific source of data about the influence of smog on people’s resipratory tract.