Counting the Cost of London's Killer Smog

Abstract

LONDON—In December 1952, an acrid yellow smog settled on this city and killed thousands of people. The catastrophe, known as the “Big Smoke,” was a turning point in efforts to clean up polluted air in cities across the Western world. It has taken half a century, though, for some of the fog to clear around the death toll from the roiling sulfurous clouds. New research suggests that the U.K. government might have underestimated the number of smog-related deaths by a factor of 3.