Medicine’s neglect of air pollution reflects a wider failure

I must begin with a confession. When I became the chair of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change (UKHACC), I learnt that much of the work of the Alliance was concerned with the harmful effects of air pollution. At the same time, I realised that despite being an editor at the BMJ for 25 years and working on non-communicable disease for eight years I knew remarkably little about air pollution. I wrote a blog about “waking up” to air pollution, and today I read that a “Cancer breakthrough is a “wake-up” call on danger of air pollution.”12 My failure, I now recognise, is a wider failure of medicine. Why have we needed to be “woken up?”Think of the tens of thousands of consultations that take place every day with patients with respiratory problems. Every one of those patients will be asked about smoking, but few will be asked about…
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