BRITAIN was today launching a major bid to cut traffic exhaust fumes as EU environment ministers met in Brussels, calling for a 30 per cent cut in emissions by 2000.

This may mean that heavy lorries will have to have special exhaust filters - a cost that the transport industry will resist.

But with an asthma epidemic, triggered by air pollution, now claiming an estimated 24,000 lives a year in Britain, every effort to cut traffic emissions is vital.

And as well as seeking to make lorries cleaner, ministers should, surely, be trying to make them fewer - with incentives that encourage much more freight to go by rail.

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