Normally, the chances of surviving burial in an avalanche are slim.
Approximately one-third of people caught in an avalanche are killed by injuries
from rocks, trees, debris or the force of the snow itself. For the remaining
two-thirds who are alive when the snow settles, survival is possible only if
they are found and dug out quickly. After 15 minutes, there is a 90 per cent
chance of survival. But after 35 minutes, suffocation will have killed 70 per
cent of people who have been buried alive.

In the tightly packed debris of an avalanche, victims typically have only a
small pocket of air to breathe. The oxygen is rapidly used up, and replaced with
carbon dioxide. Exhaled air also contains moisture, which condenses into water,
then freezes in a suffocating “ice mask” on the victim’s face.

But even avalanche debris contains 40 to 60 per cent air, and for light,
powdered snow the figure can be as high as 90 per cent. But the mouth and nose
simply don’t provide a large enough surface area to extract the air from the
snow. What is needed is a broader surface.

In a classic middle-of-the-night eureka moment, a possible solution struck
Thomas Crowley, an occasional back-country skier and a medical professor at the
University of Colorado in Denver. He conceived a device in which a broad, hollow
chamber, covered by a filter, is sewn into the front of a jacket and attached to
a breathing tube. To keep carbon dioxide levels down, one-way valves direct
exhaled air to a chamber on the victim’s back, where it is vented.

Crowley cobbled together his prototype from plastic tubing and a pair of
nylon tights. Encouraged by the results, he built a workable device and licensed
the technology to Black Diamond Equipment, a company in Salt Lake City, Utah,
that makes mountaineering equipment.

In August 1998, Crowley and Black Diamond tested the device on three male
volunteers whom they buried in snow on Mount Hood in Oregon. Oxygen levels for
two of the three remained above 90 per cent of saturation after they had been
buried for an hour. For the third subject, the level fell to 81 per cent after
45 minutes, a result that testers blamed on a faulty valve. Other tests by the
company have shown that volunteers maintain oxygen and carbon dioxide
concentrations, blood pressure and heart rhythms at “acceptable levels” for up
to an hour when using the AvaLung in conditions designed to simulate an
avalanche.

Rescue experts caution that the AvaLung is no substitute for shovels, probes,
beacons and—most important of all—training. “I’m afraid that people
think that the more they can festoon themselves with safety devices, the safer
they will be,” says Don Bachman, executive director of the American Association
of Avalanche Professionals. Says Crowley: “By no means is this a cure-all for
this horrendous force. But we think it gives a person a snowball’s chance.”

Last month, the US conglomerate Phillip Morris bought 30 per cent of
Czechoslovakia’s leading tobacco company, Tabak, for $400 million. Phillip
Morris already owns a tobacco company in Hungary, is a partner in a joint
venture with a Russian tobacco firm, and has a licensing agreement with
a Polish company. ‘We want to invest as much as we can in Eastern European
countries,’ says Phillipe Grandjean, of Phillip Morris. ‘We will continue
marketing local brands and introduce new brands, such as Marlboro and L&Ms.’

Public health experts are frustrated by such announcements. Government
statistics show that lung cancer accounts for the entire increase in cancer
in the decades of Communist rule. Thirty years ago there were fewer than
25 deaths from lung cancer per 100 000 people; by the late 1980s this figure
had reached 100. In the two years since the velvet revolution, the number
of smokers in Czechoslovakia has increased by 2.5 per cent.

While there is disagreement about the contribution air pollution makes
to lung disease, most experts agree that smoking is at the very least a
contributing factor. Some insist it is the largest factor.

Public health workers are mounting anti-smoking campaigns, but they
face massive opposition. The Marlboro and Camel advertisements reveal an
enormous loophole in a year-old law, which prohibits tobacco advertising
in mass media, but fails to define what it means by ‘mass media’. The Czech
Ministry for Economic Policy argues that the word Marlboro applies to products
other than cigarettes, and that only those who already smoke would recognise
the posters as tobacco advertisements.

To add to these obstacles, the finance ministry axed the Czech health
ministry’s proposal for a 1 per cent tax on cigarette sales to pay for antismoking
programmes. Even suggestions that cigarette packets should carry warnings
that are standard in Western countries are met with hostility. Last month
a journalist complained in the Czech magazine MLady Svet that a new warning,
‘Smoking causes cancer’, creates fear and anxiety. Tobacco brands that carry
warnings in the US, including Marlboro and Camel, have no such labels in
Czechoslovakia.

The Czechs gave nearly 30 per cent of their vote to the Civic Democratic
Party headed by the federal finance minister, Vaclav Klaus. Slovaks preferred
the nationalistic Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, led by Vladmir Meciar,
who took 37 per cent of the vote in the eastern republic. The two men, who
are diametrically opposed on economic matters, share at least one characteristic:
the environment is way down their political agendas.

Even if Klaus and Meciar manage to cobble together a coalition government,
observers expect the federal environment ministry, which oversees legislation
for the entire country, to be dissolved and each republic to tackle its
own environmental problems separately.

Three years ago, environmental issues provided a rallying point for
people disaffected with the then communist government. But in last week’s
elections, many grassroots environmentalists threw their support behind
Klaus. ‘I am voting for Klaus because I feel I must, for the sake of the
economy,’ said a member of the Prague Mothers, a group which took part in
demonstrations during the velvet revolution and continues to campaign on
green issues. Green parties earned only a small percentage of the vote,
plagued by claims that they are ‘watermelon’ parties: green on the outside,
red on the inside.

Professional environmentalists are also concerned about the state of
the economy. ‘There simply can be no environmental cleanup without money,’
says Martin Bobak, a researcher with the Czech Institute for Public Health,
which conducts basic research on the effects of poor environment on human
health.

Perhaps the biggest environmental issue facing Czechoslovakia is cleaning
up the energy industry. The 80 million tonnes of brown coal burnt every
year produce huge amounts of sulphur dioxide that are thought to be killing
the forests of Bohemia.

Yet environmentalists are split on the solution. Some groups support
a switch to nuclear energy, a policy that Greenpeace in Prague opposes.
‘People are very apathetic,’ says Antonin Muchar, of Greenpeace. ‘They say
‘yes, pollution is a problem, but what can we do, we can’t change the situation’