Do current levels of air pollution kill? The impact of air pollution on population mortality in England

Abstract

The current air quality limit values for airborne pollutants in the UK are low by historical standards and are at levels that are believed not to harm health. We assess whether this view is correct. We examine the relationship between common sources of airborne pollution and population mortality for England. We use data at local authority level for 1998-2005 to examine whether current levels of airborne pollution, as measured by annual mean concentrations of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter less than 10 microm in diameter (PM(10)) and ozone, are associated with excess deaths. We examine all-cause mortality and deaths from specific cardiovascular and respiratory causes that are known to be exacerbated by air pollution. The panel nature of our data allows us to control for any unobserved time-invariant associations at local authority level between high levels of air pollution and poor population health and for common time trends. We estimate multi-pollutant models to allow for the fact that three of the pollutants are closely correlated. We find that higher levels of PM(10) and ozone are associated with higher mortality rates, and the effect sizes are considerably larger than previously estimated from the primarily time series studies for England.

An Approach to the Estimation of Chronic Air Pollution Effects Using Spatio-Temporal Information

“…A table with a full comparison of these four studies can be found in the online Appendix. Related work on PM 10 for the US (Zanobetti, Bind, and Schwartz 2008) and England (Janke, Propper, and Henderson 2009) has found significant associations with mortality, controlling for cross-sectional differences between locations and step-function or linear time trends. For earlier results on total suspended particulates in the 70s and 80s, see Chay, Dobkin, and Greenstone (2003), Chay and Greenstone (2003).…”

Association between particulate matter air pollution and monthly inhalation and nebulization procedures in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo State, Brazil

“…Air pollution accounts for an estimated 5% of a total of more than 50 million deaths that occur annually in the world 37 . Various studies 9,38,39 have shown direct associations between particulate matter levels and morbidity and mortality rates, which raises warnings concerning the decrease in life expectancy among residents of areas with high accumulation of this pollutant, particularly in large cities. In Brazil, with the use of hydrated alcohol or the anhydrous alcohol/gasoline mixture (22% alcohol) as fuel in automotive vehicles, the population in large urban areas has felt significant improvements in the environment and health, because such use has led to a decrease in lead compound emissions 40 .…”

Providing perspective for interpreting cardiovascular mortality risks associated with ozone exposures

“…As one example, in ecological studies of long-term ozone exposure, mortality rates in different cities are analyzed with respect to city-wide ozone concentrations averaged over long periods of time (Janke et al, 2009;Wang et al, 2009). However, the prevalence of important cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking, obesity, dietary habits, and others likely vary between cities and potentially confound the observed relationships between cardiovascular mortality and ozone.…”