Just As In 1918, Air Pollution & Susceptibility To Infection Connected, Esp. In Low-Income Areas
Academics at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Montreal who studied the 1918 influenza crisis found that U.S. cities burning more coal for electricity — a stand-in for pollution at a time with little air monitoring — had substantially more “excess” deaths than low-coal cities. Their 2018 analysis compared outcomes in 180 cities, with the top third for coal use decidedly worse off than the bottom third. “It’s this hidden cost,” said co-author Joshua Lewis, an assistant economics professor at the University of Montreal.
A century later, most of those higher-pollution cities are in areas in the top third of the U.S. for ozone, the damaging dust known as fine particles or both, a Center for Public Integrity analysis found. That includes New York, a city with a large outbreak of COVID-19, the disease the new coronavirus triggers.
The good news is that the cities choked with coal smoke in 1918 have far cleaner air now, by many measures. The bad news: Researchers keep finding health impacts from pollution at lower levels, and air-quality disparities mean some Americans — disproportionately people of color and residents with less income — breathe worse air than others. “We see this unequal pattern across the United States,” said Jill Johnston, assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. “We know this kind of air pollution can really impact people across the life course, from babies to the elderly. It’s something that’s important when we think about health, to think about air quality.”
The rate of childhood asthma in New York’s Central Harlem has been estimated at four times the national level, for instance. As the coronavirus spreads through the city, Lubna Ahmed, director of environmental health for WE ACT, an environmental justice organization in Harlem, said she doesn’t want the “vulnerable communities that are so often forgotten” to get left behind yet again.
EDIT
https://publicintegrity.org/health/coronavirus-and-inequality/a-likely-but-hidden-coronavirus-risk-factor-pollution/
= new reply since forum marked as read
