What you can't see
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Pollution sickens, and pollution kills.
Scientific studies have proven it beyond a doubt. Research now is focusing on the widening variety of health problems it can cause or worsen, while tabulating a more precise death toll.
When it comes to particulate pollution, what you can't see can hurt you.
"The stuff now is more insidious but much harder to perceive," said Lester B. Lave, the Carnegie Mellon University economics professor who pioneered pollution mortality research in the 1970s. "There is no rotten egg smell. There is no dirt. It is less easily perceived. People are usually astonished that Pittsburgh still is one of the worst, but air pollution is continuing."
Studies estimate that pollution kills 20,000 to 60,000 each year in the United States. Even at the lower range, pollution deaths would equal the nation's annual rate of homicides.
The upper range would equal traffic fatalities and suicides combined and rank pollution as the nation's eighth leading cause of death, just behind diabetes -- another disease pollution has been linked with -- and just ahead of the combined category of influenza and pneumonia.
And what's true about pollution deaths holds true about particulate pollution: Both remain largely imperceptible to the general public.
For the past 40 years, science time and again has implicated particle pollution as a major killer.
In 1970, Dr. Lave and Eugene B. Seskin for the first time calculated health damage from pollution. Their subsequent book, "Air Pollution and Human Health," published in 1977, found not only "a close association between air pollution and mortality," but determined the relationship to be substantial.
Drs. Lave and Seskin's work stirred such controversy that it prompted an effort to get Dr. Lave fired from his teaching position. But their science stood the test of time and helped inspire major epidemiological studies in subsequent decades.
A 1975 study in Dublin, Ireland, documented notably fewer deaths months after the city banned the sale of coal. A later study by C. Arden Pope III of Brigham Young University -- one of the world's top pollution mortality scientists -- revealed fewer deaths and hospital admissions in a Utah valley after a local steel mill shut down temporarily.
First Published December 13, 2010 12:00 am
