Air Pollution – A Modifiable Risk Factor
We often talk about the public health risks of air pollution because it’s a modifiable risk factor. In other words, you have the ability to fix it. The proof is passage of the beefed-up Clean Air Act in the 1970s, which lowered levels of particles, ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and sulfur dioxide, along with numerous other toxic pollutants, by around 70 percent while the economy thrived. Gross domestic product has grown by 246 percent since it was enacted.
We left behind (sort of) the super-smoggy, lung-, heart- and brain-damaging air quality that haunted cities large and small before the banning of leaded gasoline in 1996 (phasing out began in the ’70s). “On the autopsy table, it’s unmistakable,” a city medical examiner told The New York Times in 1970. “The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink lungs. The city dweller’s are black as coal.”
But now there is talk of rolling back emission standards for cars. Why, why, why? It benefits neither the economy nor people. It’s just one example of the push to disregard science and health-protecting regulations.
Another example — and one that should upset us all, even though there are only 50,000 folks directly affected in the U.S. — is the resurgence of black lung disease among intrepid coal miners found mostly throughout Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. It’s a vivid example of what can happen when safeguards and regulations are weakened or ignored.