Our Polluted Planet Environmental contamination claims 9 million lives a year, and it’s going to get much worse. So BC has hired the acclaimed epidemiologist and public health champion Philip Landrigan ’63 to launch a new program and take on this global killer. By Shannon Fischer In 1948, 20 people in Donora, Pennsylvania, died from a toxic smog that enveloped the mill town for five long days. Twenty-one years later, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, glutted with factory waste, burst into flame—and not for the first time, either. That was how it used to be in the United States: the city air was thick and acrid, asbestos lined our buildings, Lake Erie was a “cesspool,” according to