Acid Rain Kills More People than AIDS

by Merritt Clifton

There was an interview with Merritt Clifton aired on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" 27 May 1989. Here's a bit of dialogue from the end of the 5 minute, 45 second report:

[...]

NPR: Now did these studies actually prove a link - that acid rain caused these cancers, or contributed to these cancers?

Clifton: In the SIDS [sudden infant death syndrome] case, there is a definite link. In the case of the breast and colon cancer, it's a strong statistical indicator.

NPR: Now your stories also included several studies; some ... are three years old: the Brookhaven National Laboratory of New York estimated that acid rain annually kills 50,000 Americans, and...

Clifton: Right, plus 11,000 Canadians.

NPR: Right, and then there was the Office of Tecnhology Assessment, which said the annual American death toll due to acid rain, they set it at 50,000 to 200,000 - and this was back in '84!

Clifton: Right.

NPR: So there have been *statistical studies* done in the past - why, why hasn't the public health community taken this seriously?

Clifton: Well, first of all, the political administration for the last eight years hasn't taken acid rain *at all* seriously, and although a good deal of money has been spent on things like sudden infant death syndrome and cancer research, it's been spent in conventional directions, which have not contradicted the political philosophies of the powers that be. Uhh.. beyond that, I really can't explain why something that's killing, uh, as many as twenty times more people as AIDS is not creating a national furor -- I don't understand it myself. I know that even though the Office of Technology Assessment is an advisory body to Congress, even most congressmen [sic] are unaware of the statistics. One of the things that may result in lower public awareness is that people who are dying of things related to acid rain seem to be dying of more familiar ailments. In the older age brackets, they're dying of things like emphysema, lung cancer, chronic asthma, bronchial obstruction - things that have always been in the mortality table. Because each one's slipping away from something that seems familiar, families aren't creating an outcry, and nobody looking at these statistics is really aware of it.

NPR: Mr. Clifton, when this story was first published, what kind of reaction did you get? And did you get any reaction from policymakers?

Clifton: Actually, it took me around a year to find anyone who was interested in the story. It was much like when I did one of the first stories that was published in Canada of the mere phenomenon of acid rain -- I really had to knock on a lot of doors to get anybody to believe, even in light of tons of scientific evidence that this was actually taking place; it sounded like science fiction to people. So did this -- Vanguard Press finally took a chance. They liked the statistics from the state of Vermont, they ran the story, then there was absolute dead silence -- no reaction whatever. I got one phone call from a reporter in the southern part of Vermont, and that was the sum total of reaction until it came up on the Project Censored list. Other than that, there's just been zero press coverage.

NPR: What's wrong--not sexy enough?

Clifton: [sigh] I don't know -- if I could figure out how to market this story, I certainly would. And yet I find that I can do a call on baseball and find publishers, no problem at all, but if I do one on acid rain killing people, the editors just shrug.

NPR: Writer Merritt Clifton -- his story on acid rain was cited by Project Censored [earlier reported as headquartered at Sonoma State University in California] as one of the ten most under-reported stories of 1988. Among the other stories cited: the abuse of incarcirated children, the extent of surveillance on citizens in the U.S. and Canada by private police agencies, the risk of a nuclear accident on the space shuttle, and George Bush's involvement with the CIA, going back to 1963.