Our Polluted Planet
Environmental contamination claims 9 million lives a year, and it’s going to get much worse. So BC has hired the acclaimed epidemiologist and public health champion Philip Landrigan ’63 to launch a new program and take on this global killer.
By Shannon Fischer
In 1948, 20 people in Donora, Pennsylvania, died from a toxic smog that enveloped the mill town for five long days. Twenty-one years later, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, glutted with factory waste, burst into flame and not for the first time, either. That was how it used to be in the United States: the city air was thick and acrid, asbestos lined our buildings, Lake Erie was a “cesspool,” according to