Governments concealed the huge threat to public health caused by air pollution in the wake of the great London smog 50 years ago, and attempted to shift all the blame on to cigarette smoking, a medical historian will allege today.

While gradually there came to be no doubt of the deaths and disease caused by cigarettes, it suited governments for political reasons that the focus should remain firmly on smoking, Virginia Berridge, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's history unit, will say at a conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the great smog.

An estimated 12,000 people died from the effects of the smog, but there was a shift in the public health agenda from the 1950s onwards towards the individual taking responsibility for his or her own health. It was not for about 30 years, according to Professor Berridge, that governments started to feel the heat for ill-health caused by the damage being done to the environment.


Comment: Same as it ever was. Another thirty years making profit through controlled public ignorance.


In 1957, Prof Berridge will tell the meeting, the Medical Research Council was planning to issue a statement saying that although smoking was a significant cause of lung cancer, up to 30% of it could be caused by air pollution.

A cabinet committee, she claims, fearful of political embarrassment, asked the MRC to reconsider.

On May 31, 1957, a modified version was published, which stated that although it was likely that atmospheric pollution did play a role in lung cancer, it was "a relatively minor one in comparison with cigarette smoking".

In 1959, the Royal College of Physicians set up a committee to examine the effects both of cigarettes and air pollution on health.

In the event, and with the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer having recently been firmly established by the Oxford epidemiologist Richard Doll - now Sir Richard - it was decided that smoking must have priority.

"It was agreed that the evidence would be of an entirely different quality and nature," says Prof Berridge. "It was pointed out that individuals could avoid the dangers of smoking but not those of pollution. It was also thought a section on atmospheric pollution within the main report might detract from the main arguments on smoking and lung cancer.

"What was happening in this committee was a shift away from a concept of health and wellbeing related to an individual's environment, occupation, class or work, towards one focused strongly on that individual's responsibility for his or her health... Smoking was something which the individual could do something about; air pollution was not," she says.

"The first Royal College of Physicians' report in 1962 was a harbinger of a new style of public health - the first building block in a change which was fully in place by the end of the 1970s. But it was not until the 1980s that environmental public health finally began to make a comeback.

"However, this environmentalist agenda differed significantly from the earlier one. Passive smoking and the policies it helped to emphasise, combined with the individualism of 1970s public health and the new environmentalism of the 80s, led to 'environmental individualism', bringing the two disciplines together at last," adds Prof Berridge.