A warning from history

THOSE who share Mayor Andy Burnham’s concern over air pollution contributing to ‘as many as 2,000 premature deaths every year in Greater Manchester’

(M.E.N., June 16) might wonder why the observations of Dr John Tatham, Salford’s Medical Officer for Health weren’t heeded when he wrote the following in 1881 about the better health in rural Cheshire, which can be seen on page 61 of Dr Stephen Mosley’s book, ‘The Chimney of the World.’

“In Salford 598 people in every 100,000 of the population die annually of lung complaints, as compared with only 334 in MidCheshire... The conditions of life in this district are not superior to those in Salford, with the one exception that the atmosphere is less contaminated by smoke... so that the extreme difference on mortality may be assumed to be mainly if not entirely due to the smoke nuisance”.

Dr Tatham became the Superintendent of the General Register Office, which celebrates its 180th birthday this year. Dr Tatham’s report on the registration year 1891 looked at the mortality rates in three industrial towns with high infant mortality and a group of three agricultural counties with low infant death rates.

Sadly, no one in authority wanted to know that air pollution was a killer all those years ago when pollution was so easily seen, and we’re now in NHS meltdown as adverse health effects of invisible pollution from industrial sources have been ignored for the last few decades. Michael Ryan