https://bgr.com/2019/05/21/los-angeles-asthma-cases-study/
[links in online article]
Surprise! When Los Angeles cleaned up its air, childhood asthma cases
dropped
Mike Wehner
May 21st, 2019 at 6:04 PM
Breathing in toxic fumes every day is bad for you, and when you take
those fumes away, you feel better. That’s the gist of a new study
published in JAMA, which came to the rather obvious conclusion that kids
in Los Angeles exhibited elevated risk of developing asthma because the
city used to sit in a massive cloud of car exhaust.
The research, which is actually rather interesting despite seeming a bit
obvious, suggests that smog levels in Los Angeles had a direct
correlation with the number of cases of childhood asthma. Using data
gathered from 1993 through 2014, the paper points to improved air
quality levels in a number of communities as being the reason for an
overall decrease in the number of asthma cases documented by area doctors.
From the early 1990s through the early 2010s, Los Angeles has seen a
significant improvement in air quality. It’s still not great, but the
researchers estimate a decrease in harmful pollutants like nitrogen
dioxide (from car exhaust) of up to 20 percent depending on the specific
area of the city. Remarkably, this is also roughly the same percentage
of decrease in the number of new asthma cases in L.A. children being
diagnosed by doctors in those specific areas.
It’s worth noting that not all communities in the city experienced the
same improvement in air quality. However, using data from three
different multi-year time windows, the researchers were able to link the
changes in asthma rates with improvements in air quality in the
surrounding regions, making it abundantly clear that air pollution
levels are a major contributing factor in respiratory health in children.
“There’s been a concerted effort in California over the period of this
study to reduce motor vehicle emissions in general and diesel emissions
in particular,” John Balmes, professor of environmental health at UC San
Francisco, told NPR. “And I think this study shows that it’s paying off.”
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