When Smoke Ran Like Water

In When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution (2002), world-renowned epidemiologist Devra Davis takes on the public triumphs and private failures she has encountered in her lifelong fight against environmental pollution. Documenting the astonishing toll of public health disasters, Davis raises the question of why we have remained silent about his issue. To Davis, the issue is very personal: pollution killed several of her family members in the 1948 smog emergency in Donora, Pennsylvania. Detailing the widespread deception surrounding these environmental hazards, Davis makes a convincing case for major change to take place.

An epidemiologist on the cutting-edge of research, Davis has long been in the field of environmental health research and policy making. She has worked for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Chemistry Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the US National Academy of Sciences.

Davis’s book provides unique insights into the science and politics surrounding public health. She carefully documents the emerging science, efforts of regulation, and sophisticated methods of sidetracking, discrediting, and stalling action.



Davis tells of efforts to remove lead from gasoline, which is considered a major triumph of public health. One of the effort’s relatively unknown heroes was toxicologist and psychiatrist Herbert Needleman. Needleman studied lead residue found in baby teeth and documented the lead levels that accumulated over time. He published a study in 1979, documenting the impacts of exposure to lead on children’s IQs. In response, an industry trade group, the International Lead Zinc Research Organization (ILZR), hired dozens of scientists who aimed to discredit Needleman’s work. A formal charge of scientific misconduct was brought against him in 1991.

However, Needleman’s work proved substantial, and follow-up studies demonstrated that the effects of lead exposure persisted into adolescence and resulted in higher rates of criminal and delinquent behavior. Needleman was awarded the Heinz Foundation Award in 1996 for his refusal to fold under the pressures placed on him and for the environmental health gains he achieved. Needleman penned an editorial in Pediatrics, a medical journal, in 1992, noting that his case revealed how easily the federal investigative process could be exploited by commercial interests such that consensus becomes clouded, the regulatory process is slowed, and investigators’ credibility is damaged.

Even more shocking is that leaded gasoline was still being used in more than one hundred countries in the year 2000. Then, in 2002, President George W. Bush appointed a representative from the lead industry as part of the chief regulatory body whose responsibility it was to determine acceptable lead exposure standards.



While outdoor air pollution has been an ongoing issue in public health since the 1600s, as late as 1967, no researcher had ever evaluated the potential long-term effects of exposure to polluted atmospheres. The results of this research were so shocking that in 1970, the US Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which aimed to reduce car emission rates by 90 percent within five years. Automobile companies resisted with cries of bankruptcy, unreliable vehicles, and job loss, but the EPA remained firm and granted them only one additional year. The industry met the new standards and improved fuel efficiency without any clear detrimental effects. Davis is quick to note that present-day calculations of action or inaction rarely include effects on human health or environmental degradation, and complaints of potential ruin are still often heard from vested interests.

Davis also explores chronic illnesses, increased disease, and death related to pollution, including breast cancer—now affecting one in eight women—and the reproductive damage and sterility affecting men and baby boys. Although federal reports relating to hazards to male reproductive health were initially released two decades ago, little information has been released since then. This, Davis argues, is due, in part, to the clever ways the corporate world has of effectively blocking and canceling research, pulling funding, and employing sophisticated public relations campaigns designed to cast doubt on the health concerns being raised.

Davis goes on to inform the reader that in 1977, thirty-five men who were working with DBCP, a pesticide, in an agricultural chemical division of Occidental Chemicals in California discovered that none were able to father children. The company refused to investigate, so the union took up the task. Tests revealed that all the men were sterile. Additional investigation led them to discover that companies that were manufacturing DBCP and the EPA all had information that the chemical had already proved to be a reproductive toxin, even in very low doses. While the toxicologist who studied DBCP warned that workers should wear full protective gear, the workers were not fully protected.



When this information was released, the chemical was quickly banned in the U.S., but Dow and Shell, the manufacturers, continued to sell the chemical to developing countries, where, once again, workers were not warned about the chemical. This resulted in lawsuits filed against the companies that awarded damages to several thousand men in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and eight other countries.

The factors at stake in the issues Davis raises affect human health in the broadest sense, including our intellectual capacity, ability to reproduce, and the survival of our species and the planet.