An article by Dr James Le Fanu writing in the Saturday Telegraph:
Commendable they may seem, but the Government’s recent, much-published proposals to combat air pollution strike me as a distraction. The banning of wood-burning stoves and similar will save thousands of lives and billions of pounds a year, asserts Environment Secretary Michael Gove. “The evidence is clear”.
Far from it, Six years ago, Ingunn Riddervold, of the Department of Public Health at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, conducted an experiment monitoring the effects on the respiratory function of exposing 20 volunteers with asthma – and thus likely to be particularly sensitive to air pollution – to concentrations of wood smoke particles 10 times higher than those generated by a wood-burning stove. This, it was anticipated, would induce “acute signs of nasal and pulmonary inflammation”.
On the contrary “No significant measurable effects were observed”, apparently, “in concordance with the findings of similar studies”.
The irony here, one might hope, has not escaped the highly intelligent and affable Gove. His assertion that the current level of air pollution in Britain “shortens lives, harms our children and reduces the quality of life” provides precisely the rationale for those burdensome regulations and pseudo-solutions for nonexistent problems that our exiting the EU is intending to avoid. Throw another log on the fire!
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