Hello.
I'm Jonathan Samet.
I'm at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine,
in the Department of Preventive Medicine.
My topic is going to be Air Quality Regulation.
What I'm going to tell you about is the general approach to using science to set
regulations, and the applications of those general principles to air quality control.
I'm going to focus in on the specific example of what we do
in the United States, and then at the end, just take a look at the global picture.
We've gotten very serious about air quality regulation after some
truly dramatic episodes of death caused by air pollution.
These took place across the last century, the Meuse Valley in 1930,
Donora Pennsylvania here in the United States in 1948,
most importantly the London fog of 1952.
The London fog of 1952 was actually not a fog but a deadly episode
of air pollution with air pollution reaching levels perhaps 100 times, or
more what they are today even in Los Angeles.
Over the week of the fog, and subsequently thousands of people,
10,000, 20,000 died prematurely, and
these episodes were a wake up call to the need for control of air pollution.
The colleague, a friend of Dr. David Bates, an important figure in respiratory
medicine and air-pollution research, was actually in the emergency department in,
in London during the fog of 52 and wrote about it.
He talked in a paper shown here about,
the efforts to limit air pollution that followed in the decades after the fog,
noted that these improvements were a proper memorial to those who gave their
lives, or who were killed, actually, during this episode.