British Food Journal Volume 48 Issue 7 1946

This report is addressed to the Health Committee of the City of Salford and the associated boroughs of Eccles and Stretford, on whose behalf the analytical examinations were made, the account of which form the basis of the report. It is stated that the number of samples of foods and drugs examined during the year 1945 is the highest for any year since the laboratory was opened in 1914. The number is 3,754. It includes 948 sunlight tests. We judge that the demands made on the time of the laboratory could not be met, as the report points out that the phosphatase tests so increased in number—292—that the sunlight tests had to be discontinued for several months in the year. The smoke versus sunshine problem is acute and unsolved in all large manufacturing centres. Manchester, for example, is said to lose half its share of winter sunshine through its smoke‐polluted air. While the purity of water supply in all large centres of population is fortunately assured, the administrative and technical difficulties of clearing the air from suspended impurities are of a different order and very great. Apart from factories and workshops, everyone who lights a fire to cook a breakfast adds, of necessity, to the volume of acrid filth surging in the air overhead. The figures given illustrate this. The soot gauge records from four stations show monthly averages of from 5·60 to 8·85 metric tons of soot per square kilometre or say from 15 to 20 odd long tons per square mile. A high proportion of this stuff consists of carbonaceous matter, other than tar, and ash. In addition to this there are gaseous sulphur compounds, acid in character.