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Expectant mothers are also menaced by smoking, drinking and by VDUs. • Babies and children are not only at risk of cot death, immunisation complications and skin damage from sunlight, they are also in danger from ‘poisonous dummies’ (phthalates), dangerous toys and contaminated baby foods (Durodie 1999). While ‘breast is best’ and formula feeds potentially harmful, breast milk has also been shown to transmit numerous toxins. The spectre of meningitis, a rare condition whose features are now familiar to millions, hovers over every viral illness which pro-duces a fever and a rash.

Mortality from coronary heart disease grew at an even faster rate, reaching twice the rate of lung cancer in the early 1950s and three times the rate in the 1960s. Sudden death from a heart attack, particularly affecting men in middle age—a condition virtually unknown before the First World War—became familiar throughout the Western world. The coronary death rate in Britain reached a plateau in the late 1970s and then slowly declined (in the USA, this fall began a decade earlier). The cause of the rapid increase in CHD was (and largely remains) a mystery, as does the reason for its more recent decline (which began before any of the familiar preventive interventions had been implemented on a large scale).

In a critical commentary, the Australian medical research scientist Raymond Johnstone noted that the annual death rate from lung cancer among the non-smoking wives of nonsmoking men is around six per 100,000, whereas among the nonsmoking wives of smoking men the corresponding figure is eight per 100,000. Now this may be reported as an increased (relative) risk of 33 per cent. Yet in absolute terms it amounts to an absolute (or exposure) risk of one in 50,000, which is, for practical purposes, negligible.