Word: lungfuls
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Very few of us are breathing easy these days. That grim news comes courtesy of an American Lung Association study, released Tuesday, that rates the air quality in cities across the nation - and hands failing grades to nearly half. Those receiving F's include a broad cluster of California cities, as well as many other, less predictable metropolitan areas like Birmingham, Ala., and Wilmington, Del. Leaping to the defense of recent, tougher anti-smog regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency has already criticized the report, claiming the ALA rankings, while technically accurate, don't represent the efforts of many pollution-prone...
Obviously, the ALA is not interested in whether it is hurting anyone's feelings - it just wants to ensure that city dwellers have clean air to breathe. Responding to EPA criticism, officials at the Lung Association insist their analysis and report card serves to focus valuable public attention on smog's burgeoning threat to the elderly and young, as well as to asthma sufferers of all ages. Many in the medical community tend to agree. "Poor air quality, which can be influenced by a variety of fumes, chemicals and allergens, is arguably the leading cause of triggers for most asthmatics...
Source: American Lung Association/American Thoracic Society meeting
Kate Tateman, 31, a poet and some-time academic, discovers she is pregnant with her first child at about the same time she learns that her mother, approaching 60, has been told she has inoperable lung cancer. This juxtaposition of a birth and a death foretold offers some fairly obvious ironies and occasions for pathos, almost all of which Jayne Anne Phillips avoids in her third novel, MotherKind (Knopf; 291 pages; $24). Instead of ruminating on the metaphysical significance of her premise and the story that springs from it, Phillips concentrates on the day-to-day details of ordinary existence...
DRUG WARNING Since its debut in 1998, Herceptin has stemmed the growth of breast cancer in tens of thousands of women. But now its maker, Genentech, is alerting doctors to possible adverse reactions and even death in a small percentage of patients who have a history of lung problems and did not respond to chemotherapy. A new label in the works will help doctors select the patients best suited for the gene-spliced drug. --By Janice M. Horowitz...