OZONE DEATH STUDY
Have you ever wondered exactly what the significance of ozone alert days are?
Yale University researchers have uncovered a startling fact i.e. that more people will die on ozone alert days because of pollutants.
The fact is there’s actually good ozone and bad ozone. Ozone alerts naturally aim to warn against detrimental ozone. The good ozone is the ozone that’s way up in the atmosphere that protects us against the harmful rays of the sun. The bad ozone is down here, near the ground. And the latest study shows ground level ozone is associated with an increased short term death rate.
Already, ozone has been associated with a wide range of human health problems, especially an increase of respiratory symptoms such as coughing and wheezing.
But when the air quality gets bad, this new study shows it can kill. The research in the journal of the American Medical Association involves the collection of a very large data set of mortality rates in 95 large urban centers in the United States from 1987 to 2000.
Dr. Michelle Bell, the Yale researcher who led the study, says, “We looked at whether or not morality rates are higher when the previous week’s ozone levels are higher. So you can think of it by comparing two different weeks, a high ozone week and a low ozone week that are otherwise similar, with similar weather patterns, similar levels of other pollution, and see whether or not the mortality rates differ.”
The study examined roughly 40% of the U.S. population over 14 years, in places ranging from Jersey City to Demoines.
“We did find that there are higher mortality rates when the previous week’s ozone is higher,” reports Dr. Bell.
The risk of death was similar for adults regardless of age, but it was slightly higher for people with respiratory or cardiovascular problems.
Most worrisome: the increase in deaths occurred at ozone levels below the environmental protection agency (EPA) clean air standards.
The researchers found that an increase of 10 parts per billion in weekly ozone levels was associated with a more than 0.5% daily increase in deaths the following week.
The good news: a 10 parts per billion reduction in daily ozone, which is roughly 35% of the average daily ozone level, could save nearly 4,000 lives throughout the 95 urban communities included in the study.
Ozone is predominantly the result of vehicle emissions. The ozone comes from hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides in the emissions. The more vehicles there are on the road and the more miles traveled directly correlates to the levels of ozone in the environment.
“We are not finding that ozone is just a problem in some key cities that we might think of like Southern California but rather that ozone is a much more severe problem affecting much of the United States,” states Dr. Bell.
There was a variance between cities in mortality rates related to the same degree of ozone concentration, but the researchers say they don’t know why that would be. Dr. Bell says the main point is that on a national level, ozone is a killer overall.
The bottom line from the various ozone alert studies is this- regardless of the city, cleaner air will save lives.
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