Re: Deaths from fossil fuel burning air pollution

["ruth_weiner" <ruth_weiner@email.msn.com>]

Sorry -- I still do not find this credible.  Approximately 40,000 people die
each year in the U. S. in traffic accidents, which is a very credible number
because I read about such accidents certainly a couple of times a month or
more, and that coincides pretty well with the accident frequency.  That is,
40,000 per year in the U. S. would mean about 70 per year in a community of
half a million (such as where I live).  Correcting for the higher frequency
in urban areas, that's about 100 per year here, or about 8 per month, on the
average.  The "80,000 per year" statistic would indicate that about 200
people would die each year (about 18 per month)ONLY from breathing air
pollutants.  Moreover, that number should have been much larger before 1980.
It should be much much larger in Athens or Mexico City.

I believe (Harvard notwithstanding) that such "prospective" studies simply
have too many confounding factors to isolate the effect of a single,
diffuse, rather vague factor like air pollution, or even particulate matter.

No this is not an argument either against nukes or "for" coal burning plants
or "for" dirty air.  We just have to do better than competing scare stories
about pollutants.

Ruth Weiner
ruth_weiner@msn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Bernard L Cohen <blc+@pitt.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Friday, November 17, 2000 11:46 AM
Subject: Deaths from fossil fuel burning air pollution


> There was some discussion recently on estimates of number of
>deaths per year in U.S. from air pollution due to fossil fuels. It was
>introduced here as a report from a low credibility "Environmental Group"
>and there were several comments here that the tens of thousands of deaths
>they estimated were incredible.
> I decided to trace down the source and it has taken a few weeks to
>do it, but I have finally got it. The source was an EPA Report released in
>November 1999, EPA-410-R-99-01 on Benefits and costs of the Clean Air Act.
>It is loaded with references, but when all is said and done, the principal
>reference is to a study by a large Harvard Group published by C.A. Pope
>and 6 coauthors, Am J Respir Crit Care Med 151:669-674;1995. It was a
>prospective study linking air pollution data on sulfate particles and fine
>particulates for 151 Metropolitan areas with individual risk factors for
>552,000 adults who resided in those areas, 11,000 of whom died during the
>follow-up period. They adjusted for smoking, education, and and several
>other factors. The ratio of mortality risk (with 95% confidence intervals)
>for the most polluted to the least polluted areas were:
> Based on sulfates, all causes 1.15 (1.09-1.22)
>    lung CA 1.36 (1.11-1.66)
>    cardiopulminary 1.26 (1.16-1.37)
>
> Based on fine particulates, all causes 1.17 (1.09-1.26)
>     lung CA 1.03 (0.80-1.33)
>     cardiopulmonary 1.31 (1.17-1.46
>
> Their paper also reviews other studies (Lave & Seskin, Lipfert
>et al, Ozkaynak et al, Dockery et al),and it concludes that the
>results are similar.
> If 8% of deaths in areas of *average* pollution are due to air
>pollution, and half of all people live in Metropolitan areas (my guess,
>but I can check on this), that means that 4% of all U.S. deaths, 80,000
>per year, are due to air pollution. This agrees with other estimates, and
>I believe it should be taken seriously. I have always used such estimates,
>compared with less than 10 deaths per year from nuclear power (including
>accidents and buried waste treated probabilistically) in my attempts to
>justify nuclear power to the public. It seems to me that this is an
>overwhelming argument -- or is there something wrong with me? In this, I
>conservatively use 10,000 deaths per year from coal burning power plants.
>
>
>Bernard L. Cohen
>Physics Dept.
>University of Pittsburgh
>Pittsburgh, PA 15260
>Tel: (412)624-9245
>Fax: (412)624-9163
>e-mail: blc+@pitt.edu
>
>
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