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.

Comments

unverified assertion

[rubycodez]

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).