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Preterm Births Linked To Air Pollution Cost Billions In The US (time.com)
mdsolar quotes a report from TIME: Air pollution leads to 16,000 premature births in the United States each year, leading to billions of dollars in economic costs, according to new research. Researchers behind the study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that preterm births associated with particulate matter -- a type of pollutant -- led to more than $4 billion in economic costs in 2010 due to medical care and lost productivity that results from disability. And, like many other public health issues, affected populations tend to be concentrated in low-income areas home to large numbers of minorities. "This is another piece of the evidentiary pie about why we should really be doing something about air pollution," says Tracey Woodruff, a professor who studies reproductive health and the environment at the University of California, San Francisco. "When you reduce air pollution you get lots of different health benefits." Countless studies have shown the effect of air pollution on cardiovascular and respiratory health -- killing millions each year. Air pollution leads to inflammation in blood vessels and contributes to lung cancer, asthma and a slew of other disorders. The effect on pregnancy may in some ways be an extension of those effects as air pollution disrupts the way a pregnant woman delivers oxygen to the fetus. Air pollution may also disrupt the endocrine system, keeping women from producing a protein needed to regulate pregnancy, researchers say.
Can we please get a tech story soon?
Federal scam alerts and air pollution are...not really why we're all here.
They aren't really people yet.
They live too close to the factory because they're cheap and don't care about their kids.
Why is it concentrated in low-income areas. Wouldn't densely populated rich Urban areas like Manhattan be at high risk from Air pollution?
The study makes a lot of assumptions, and 'concludes' there is a correlation but I don't see the data behind that part. The cost includes a lot of interesting components, including lifetime productivity loss for the PTB individual. They include any economic loss they can count, but they don't offset with the jobs created by caring for some of the individuals, which sounds cold but it should be factored in as well.
Regardless, this study seems to have a very wide margin of error associated with it.
there are over 500,000 pre-term births in the USA, so 15,000 are due to particulate air pollution eh?
This little slice from the paper says it all, i.e., their claim is an ass-pull
Though uncertainty remains about the contribution of specific outdoor
air pollutants and
windows of vulnerability, multiple observational studies of prenatal exposure have associated
among other pollutants with adverse birth
outcomes, most especially LBW and PTB (Darrow et al. 2009; Kloog et al. 2012; Laurent et al.
2016), although some studies did not report this association (Johnson et al. 2016). In addition,
one quasi-experimental study identified reductions in PTB and LBW in association with
electronic toll collection, which also reduced traffic congestion and vehicle emissions
.
Further support for the notion that outdoor air pollution exposure may contribute to adverse
birth outcomes is provided by laboratory experiments that document oxidant stress, inflammation
and placental insufficiency as mechanisms by which air pollutants
can contribute to early
delivery (Institute of Medicine 2007; USEPA 2013; Woodruff et al. 2009).
I can only hope sooner rather than later we as a species accept the fact our bond to this earth is closer and more intimate than we have generally been aware. Things we do that impact the environment whether it is air pollution, water pollution, fracking, deforestation etc etc dramatically impacts our quality of life as a species. Furthermore the impact may not be felt in our lifetimes, but during the lifetimes of generations not yet born !
16,000 premature births were also caused by....guns, religion, too much tv, social networks, mobile phones, income inequality, terrorism, and just about every other talking point by either side in the current election. So....let's do something about it! It is costing us lots of money!
Hypothesis: noise pollution leads to bad sleeping habits in a pregnant mother which negatively impact the health of a baby.
It would be interesting to see a study mapping noise pollution (high-density fire and ambulance all night, nearby night clubs or bars, etc...) with health of the child.
Like, microinfractions that accumulate through bloodlines, you say?
Me, I just wonder if the cost of mopping up the trouble is less than the actual (not projected) gains. As it stands, the projected gains are enormous and the cleanup cost is zero because they didn't look at that. Convenient, but not entirely honest. That's ideologically-driven activist "research" in organically synthesised science-like sauce product for you.
Sure, sure.....no one is in favor of air pollution. And to be fair, we've made huge strides in the last 30 years. Anyone else here remember what L.A. used to look like? But, let's get this clear: CO2 is not a pollutant. It's the plants' biosphere.
I would hate to guess what it costs in China, India, Russia, etc. Our air is far far cleaner than most of the other nations. Even now, we are wiping out emissions from coal, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Elon will save us!
As compared to forced birth policies which cost us in welfare, law enforcement, and healthcare?
The stillbirth rate is higher in China. http://chartsbin.com/view/1445 Perhaps there is a different way of counting owing to different neonatal procedures.
The evidence for harmful effects of particulates, especially the smalles ones, keeps increasing and yet the U.S. keeps insisting on lax emissions standards for particulate mass and no limits on the number of particles at all (favouring the smallest and most dangerous particles). In fact, the arbitrarily strict limits on NOx emissions even stimulate higher particulate emissions, as engine design and operation choices typically involve a tradeoff between those two types of emissions.
You like to kill babies, but then claim that pollution is causing too many birthing problems.
Which is it?
All of the air pollution, water pollution, fracking, deforestation, and general environmental impact we've had on the world has been the result of processes that ultimately lead to a dramatically improved quality of life for us. Sometimes you gotta take the good with the bad.
The consensus has spoken!
If the U.S. which has lower corrupt indexes and not so archaic environmental policies, imagine what about other countries like China or Mexico where just last week the levels of pollution were twice above the "normal" levels in Los Angeles.