The practical societal problem of pollution and public health as the source of a variety of problems regarding chance mechanisms operating in living organisms

The essence of the societal problem which justifies the expenditure of large sums on studies of pollution and health is illustrated by three figures included in this paper. The first two of these figures illustrate the contemporary publicity favoring the two competing energy-producing technologies, the nuclear and the conventional fossil-burning technologies. The very existence of this costly publicity demonstrates that the decisions affecting public health are now frequently made without due regard to the relevant scientific findings. The third figure illustrates the most laudable effort of the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a relationship between hoped-for decreases in mortality and the dollar cost of removing from the environment any one of the several investigated pollutants, e.g., “particulates”, krypton-85, tritium, etc.The subsequent parts of this presentation tend to document the fact that the reliability of the EPA chart published in 1973 is illusory. The same applies to the large number of other official publications, including those of the National Academy of Sciences. The results of more modern studies brought to the fore a variety of biological chance mechanisms, such as competing risks, dose-rate effects, synergisms, etc., which make the problem attacked by EPA much more difficult than was originally anticipated.The basic research, combining the laboratory experimentation on animals and theoretical considerations, results in a better understanding of a variety of phenomena. However, this better understanding seems to imply that the solution of the practical societal problem requires a large multipollutant and multilocality epidemiological study.