Breathing (and dying) in L.A.
Top smog doctors find new maladies
While smog descends daily on the Los Angeles basin, Dr. John Froines is hard at work trying to figure out what exactly the pollutants are doing to our health. He and other researchers in this growing field are rapidly discovering that we should be worried - extremely worried - about what we're breathing.
"It's very serious - I don't think people understand how serious it is," said Froines, who, along with his work at the UCLA Pollution Prevention Education and Research Center, helps direct five other centers that explore the relationships between pollution and illness, studies that are yielding ever more alarming discoveries of the strong links that bind the two together.
"We know that particles of one kind penetrate the brain, so there's a lot of interest now at looking at neurological damage from air pollution," he said, noting the deleterious effects air pollution has on our health. "The more you look, the more you find."
The current body of scientific evidence also shows that air pollution exacerbates or causes asthma and other respiratory illnesses, slow lung growth in children, birth defects, atherosclerosis (a disease affecting arterial blood vessels that basically hardens the arteries), several other heart ailments and various kinds of cancer.
More than 16 million people run the risk of having to cope with these problems in the basin, where they are forced to inhale the nation's worst-rated air, a noxious mixture of pollutants ladled into the basin like a deadly soup. These pollutants lead to more than 5,000 premature deaths a year and 2,400 hospitalizations in Southern California, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), spurring the organization to petition, along with the Southern California Association of Governments, the governor and President Bush to declare a state of emergency to address the problem.
The problem begins and ends with air pollutants, which can be broken down into two categories: ozone and particle pollution. Ozone is the primary component of smog, while particle pollution, or particulate matter (PM), is a mixture of microscopic specks - more than a million of them can be found in a marble-sized chunk of air - and liquid droplets that can be inhaled into the lungs and cause serious health problems, some of which are just now being discovered at many of the places Froines helps direct - the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, an initiative between a number of UC campuses; the Los Angeles-based Southern California Particle Center, another effort between UC and other universities; the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center, involving USC and UCLA; the Asthma Consortium; and UCLA's Fogarty Program in Environmental and Occupational Health.
While research into these links continues apace, a tempest is brewing over how Southern California's largest fixed sources of pollution, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, are going to be cleaned up. With 40 percent of all trade coming into the United States through the twin ports, port activities pump out nearly 25 percent of the basin's diesel pollution. According to the Coalition for Clean Air, the 2 million people who live within 15 miles of the ports face a cancer risk at least 50 times higher than what is safe, as stipulated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while an estimated 1,200 people die prematurely every year as a result of the pollutants that are belched out daily from the ports.
"We have a whole generation of kids breathing dirty air, and it will affect their lungs, their hearts, and their health throughout their lives," said Dr. Ed Avol, a professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at USC's Keck School of Medicine. "With respect to infants and pregnant mothers, it will affect the development of the fetus, and will set them on a pathway of less-than optimal health had they been growing up with cleaner air. For adults it will make it more difficult for them to breathe, it could increase rates of cancer, [and] will shorten life spans. There's a range of diseases and illnesses that all come from normal [day-to-day life], so we really need to get to cleaning up the air."
Asthma, the most common childhood disease in California, has become a particularly worrisome problem for Los Angeles residents, especially children, as the link between pollutants and both the development and exacerbation of asthma has become clearer. A recent USC study found that children living closer to freeways had far higher risks of asthma, further bolstering that link.
"It's bad - I honestly don't know if people realize how bad things are for their kids. We definitely see a higher prevalence of asthma in Los Angeles than in other parts of the country, and I think air pollution has a major role in this," said Dr. Lyne Scott, who works with children in the Breathmobile program, a mobile asthma clinic that provides free diagnosis, treatment and patient education to low-income, asthmatic school children in Southeast Los Angeles County. "When the smog is thicker out, the kids tend to come in and they're sicker - it definitely aggravates their asthma. I moved out from South Carolina two years ago, and there's definitely a difference in the number of kids that I see that have asthma here."
Other social and economic problems result from illnesses that are caused by air pollutants. The California Air Resources Board estimates that there are 1.3 million school absences, 2.8 million lost workdays, and 1.7 million respiratory illnesses annually as a result of air pollution, in addition to drastically higher mortality rates and hospital visits.
"The air quality situation is dire," said Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the AQMD, noting that the basin still falls short of meeting state and federal standards for ozone and particulate matter levels. "We still have an enormous task ahead of us to reduce our pollution, in order to protect public health."
Avol concurs: "At best, we're talking about 2024 for reaching ozone compliance, and 2015 for particulate matter compliance, so in terms of public health we're talking about a generation continuing to be exposed," he said, recommending that we continue to develop technology to clean up existing vehicles that move commodities, while looking at alternative ways to transport goods as well. "Tomorrow will never come if we don't start thinking about these things today."
Published: 09/06/2007
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