Gender and Social Inequities in Health—A Public Health Issue.

Abstract

This is a powerfully written book, and it is not only about environmental research and epidemiology itself, but also about the life of a scientist before and after research. In movingly written chapters the childhood years spent in a horrendously polluted steel mill town in the Monongahela valley become the backdrop for a life devoted to environmental research. An extreme pollution episode during a fog period culminates in the loss of many lives and is described like a crime story. From there, Devra Davis takes us to the places and times of other environmental carnages of the past, to a foggy London and an utterly polluted Liege. These chapters are written like wartime reports about the effects of a mixture of limited knowledge, poverty, and malign intent to disguise the real effects of pollution, lest we forget to stop this from happening again now and in the future.