A new study finds that short-term exposure to pollution can send you straight to the hospital for more reasons than scientists originally thought. Even at levels that are below international air quality guidelines, it can still damage your health. Thus, the new insights suggest that the global air quality guidelines need to be revised.
Fine particulate matter or particle pollution is the pollution that is investigated by scientists that have a diameter that is less than 2.5 micrometers. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, it is a mix of liquid and solid droplets that are found in the air. It is so small, around 1/20th of the width of a human hair, you can't see it, and it can travel through your body's usual defenses.
Air pollution's effect on your health
This type of pollution can be damaging to your health because once you breathe it in, the particles can get stuck in your lungs. Worse is it can work its way into your bloodstream, and it can cause irritation and inflammation that can ultimately lead to respiratory problems and other forms of diseases.
Source of air pollution
Coal and natural gas-fired plants, agriculture, cars, construction sites, and unpaved roads are just some of the sources of this particulate matter. The pollution comes in the form of dust, smoke, soot or dirt.
To know the full extent of the costs and the risk of hospitalization due to short-term exposure to this pollution in the United States, the researches looked at more than 95 million records that were gathered from Medicare inpatient hospital claims from 2000 to 2012. For the environmental data, the researchers made a model that was based on pollution concentrations. They were measured at 1,928 EPA monitoring sites.
A professor of biostatistics, population, and data science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and study author Prof. Francesca Dominici said that it took a lot of computational power to know the full extent of the risk and cost of hospitalization because of the exposure to the pollution. They used an entire Harvard supercomputer to do this, and now they really have the data platform to allow a comprehensive look at almost 200 causes of hospitalization.
Dominici and her colleague analyzed the data, and they saw a link between exposure to particle pollution and the disease that you might expect to correlate like cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. But the study also showed an increased risk of hospitalization from pollution due to some unexpected diseases, including kidney failure, septicemia, urinary tract infections, and skin infections.
The study was published in the BMJ, and it also noted that an association between the exposure to this form of pollution and the risk of hospitalization form diabetes, Parkinson's' disease, thromboembolism and thrombophlebitis. This connection has been seen in different studies. Even at levels below, those with 25 micrograms of concentrations per cubic meter or less, shows that there as an absolute and relative percentage increase in the risk of hospital admission for most of the diseases examined in the study.
The scientists suggest that the WHO air quality guidelines that are made to offer guidance on how we can reduce the negative health consequences of air pollution needs to be changed.
Prof. Dominici said that this is an ongoing debate right now, but it is also one of the most robust pieces of evidence that should inform the review of these WHO guidelines and make the argument for lowering these standards. These health problems continue, even if the numbers are low.
In April, a study was published and showed that exposure to fine particulate matter was connected to more than 107,000 premature deaths in America in 2011. This number is higher than those that were killed by homicides and traffic accidents combined. The overall cost that the country allotted was $866 billion, which is more than double the value of all the economic activity in Ireland.
There is still so much research that needs to be done on how damaging the fine particulate pollution can be to your health. The knowledge gaps should not be mistaken for the lack of evidence. The sooner that we all act, the sooner we can reap the benefits of cleaner air.
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