Reducing pollution produces measurable health gains, said a study released on Wednesday that found cleaner air had lengthened life expectancy by five months in 51 US cities.
Researchers at Brigham Young University and Harvard School of Public Health found that average life expectancy increased by three years between 1980 and 2000 in those cities and that approximately five months of that gain owed to cleaner air.
“Such a significant increase in life expectancy attributable to reducing air pollution is remarkable,” said C. Arden Pope III, a BYU epidemiologist and lead author on the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “We find that we’re getting a substantial return on our investments in improving our air quality. Not only are we getting cleaner air that improves our environment, but it is improving our public health.”
The researchers compared data in 51 US cities on changes in air pollution between those 20 years and the life expectancies of residents during those years.
They applied advanced statistical models to account for other factors possibly affecting life spans, such as changes in demographics, income, migration, population, education and cigarette smoking.
Cities that had previously been the most polluted and saw the most extensive clean-ups added an average 10 months to residents’ lives.
By the end of the study period, life expectancy had increased by 2.72 years in the cities studied, with up to five months, or 15 percent of that gain owing to reduced air pollution.
Other studies have shown that these gains probably owe to a decrease in cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary diseases often linked to air pollution.
Pope and study co-author Douglas Dockery of Harvard teamed up with other researchers on studies published in the early 1990s that found that “PM2.5” — pollutants less than 2.5 microns in diameter — had negative health effects. The Environmental Protection Agency used those and other studies as a basis to tighten air pollution standards in 1997.
Analysis in the latest study found that for every decrease of 10 micrograms per cubic meter of particulate pollution in a city, the average life expectancy of residents in the city grew by more than seven months. The average PM2.5 levels in the 51 cities studied dropped from 21 to 14 micrograms per cubic meter during the 1980s and 1990s. Health gains were also found in cities that initially had relatively clean air, but then made further improvements in reducing air pollution.
“There is an important positive message here that the efforts to reduce particulate air pollution concentrations in the United States over the past 20 years have led to substantial and measurable improvements in life expectancy,” Pope said.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS