Diesel particulates - visible in London atmosphere - cause cancer, as dangerous as asbestos and mustard gas?

The World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer has explicitly said diesel fumes cause cancer http://press.iarc.fr/pr213_E.pdf . Diesel particulates and vapour were found to be carcinogenic  MP4 Video Link  (full info follow links on this page  http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/2012/mono105-info.php and Lancet ). Diesel fumes have been compared to asbestos and mustard gas in their toxicity.

Both the very small particles, considered most harmful to health, and much larger particles form a visible brown haze over central London. So often cancer is considered to have been caused by lifestyle choices such as smoking, and that is linked to poverty and lack of choices by poorer inner-city dwellers. And yet much of it may be caused by the lifestyle of richer, suburban and rural dwellers, who support their idylls off the labour of the inner city. For the health of society, and to make cities productive AND desirable locations to live, we need a new Clean Air Act - http://www.air-quality.org.uk/03.php - such as the one that cleared up London's choking, killing, smogs

22nd June 2010 before rain, Canary Wharf blocks all-but obscured by filth

29th June 2010, after rain, air visibly cleaner

The role of particulates in city-centre air pollution is well known - they are tiny pieces of diesal/petroleum smuts that can stick in your lungs like tar, increasing risk of respiratory diseases. They also trigger the release of stress hormones that release more cholestorol into the blood stream increasing the likelihood of heart attacks (see Environmental Health Perspectives  New England Journal of Medicine  ). And yet we blithely attribute many of these factors to other "lifestyle choices", shifting the blame onto the individual for their ill-health, whilst "fit" middle-classes live in suburbs with fewer particles and healthier air. Take a look at the two photographs above and below. Both are taken from the far east of London, looking towards the centre. The top one of each set was taken , on a sunny day, after a week of sunny days. The bottom is taken a few days later,  after some decent rainfall. In the second picture, the Canary Wharf office tower blocks are clearly visible, whilst they are obscured in the first. This visible pollution is

23rd June 2010 looking west, before rain  - line of filth visible in atmosphere

29th June 2010, after rain - note Canary Wharf Tower blocks in centre and line of filth in atmosphere gone

The photos were taken from the track across Crossness Nature Reserve in east London, on the floodplain on the south side of the Thames. It was drained by monks of Lesnes Abbey in the 13th / 14th century to provide grazing for commercial beef production for the City of London, and/or wool (London was a great exporter of wool in the middle ages). The reserve is a refuge for water voles, who face predation by American mink, amongst other things, elsewhere in south-east England