Friday August 13, 2010 at 6:08pm
Pollution affects the lives of millions of people and cause death, illness and disease.
Environmental pollution results from the contamination by chemical or radioactive substances that renders the air, land, sea and rivers unfit for their natural use.
Environmental pollution claims also covers contamination caused by the use of pesticides and chemicals in the environment.
The starting point for an environmental pollution claim is that you suffered the illness or disease as an innocent victim whose only link with the cause of the pollution was that the pollution occurred where you live, work or have a parent who was exposed to a toxic substance.
Environmental pollution claims are complex, the illness or disorder may not be obviously linked to a particular pollutant. You may not realise that your illness has been caused by environmental pollution and your may neither know nor explain the cause of your illness.
Increasing amounts of public funding have been put into epidemiological (study of the causes of illness through the use of statistics) studies in the understanding of the patterns of cancers like leukaemia.
In most claims involving environmental pollution, the victims will have suffered a great deal of pain and stress.
How to prove your Environmental Pollution Claim:
You will have to prove that the particular pollutant emanating from a particular source caused your specific illness, injury or disorder.
Your environmental pollution lawyer will have to provide biological evidence from experiments conducted in your type of illness to establish the cause.
Where there is epidemiological evidence, showing a statistical association between the exposure and increased risk of injury in question, this will usually need to be supported by biological evidence. You may need to refer to that evidence to demonstrate a plausible mechanism and to prove that the level of exposure (i.e. dose) was more likely than not the cause of your injury or disorder.
Epidemiological evidence will be of great assistance if it can show a correlation. One of the reasons for this is that the epidemiologists by convention require a relationship to be statistically significant before they will say that such a relationship or correlation is real. Although epidemiological evidence does not constitute biological proof of causation, in the absence of contradictory biological evidence, statistical evidence may constitute proof of legal causation.
If you have suffered illness or disease as a result of pollution, you may be entitled to claim compensation.