PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Communities of color across the US suffer a growing burden from polluted air

Study finds minoritized communities endure nearly 8 times higher rates of pediatric asthma and 1.3 times higher risk of dying prematurely from exposure to pollutants

Communities of color across the US suffer a growing burden from polluted air
2024-03-06
(Press-News.org) WASHINGTON (March 6, 2024)--Despite progress toward cleaner air in the US, a new study suggests that communities of color across the nation are shouldering a growing burden of diseases linked to air pollution. A paper published today by researchers at the George Washington University suggests that racial and ethnic disparities in cases of pollutant-linked diseases like asthma increased during the last decade.

 

“Redlining and systemic racism have resulted in the least white areas of the US being located near factories, congested roadways or shipping routes with heavily polluted air,” says Gaige Kerr, a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the GW Milken Institute School of Public Health. “This study highlights the need for place-based policies that allocate resources and target action into historically-overburdened communities in the United States.”

 

Kerr and his colleagues quantified census tract-level variations in health outcomes attributable to two forms of damaging pollutants–nitrogen dioxide, which typically comes from cars, trucks and other vehicles in urban areas, and fine particulate matter, commonly called soot. They pulled demographic data from the US Census Bureau and looked at novel datasets that incorporate NASA satellite data to estimate pollution concentrations and how concentrations and associated health impacts differed depending on the location.

 

The researchers found:

 

Racial and ethnic disparities in the health impacts associated with nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter widened during the last decade. The relative disparity in premature deaths caused by exposure to fine particulate matter between the least and most white communities of the US increased by 16% and between the least and most Hispanic communities by 40% during the last decade.  The relative disparity in pediatric asthma caused by exposure to nitrogen dioxide across different racial groups grew by 19% in the US during the last ten years. Overall, an estimated 49,400 premature deaths and nearly 115,000 new cases of pediatric asthma were linked to fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, respectively, in the United States in 2019. Communities of color in the United States experienced 7.5 times higher pediatric asthma rates and 1.3 times higher premature mortality rates due to these pollutants compared with most white communities.  

People living in neighborhoods ringed by factories or next to highways can be exposed to high levels of both nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter. Nitrogen dioxide is a pollutant that can irritate the lungs and can trigger asthma attacks. Evidence suggests that for children, exposure to the traffic-related air pollution mixture, for which nitrogen dioxide is a marker, can actually cause asthma, a lifelong condition that can be life threatening. 

 

Fine particulate matter can lodge deep in the lungs and get into the bloodstream. Fine particulate matter has been linked to a number of diseases including heart disease, lung cancer and stroke.

 

“This research shows that the health disparities from exposure to these pollutants are larger than disparities in the exposures themselves, and that the disparities widened over the last decade even as pollution levels fell,” said Susan Anenberg, co-author of the research and director of the GW Climate and Health Institute at the Milken Institute School of Public Health. “As the US presidential election starts to gear up, this study also demonstrates the importance of continued strong regulations to protect air quality and people’s health.”

 

The study found the estimated monetary value attributed to mortality risk for premature death due to particulate matter as well as the direct costs of pediatric asthma due to nitrogen dioxide in 2019 amounted to $466 billion or roughly 2.2% of the US gross domestic product. 

 

“The study also shows that the Environmental Protection Agency air quality standards are not adequately protecting Americans, especially the most marginalized communities,” Kerr said. “The adverse health effects linked to fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide pollution in our study occurred even though EPA air quality standards were largely met,” He added that the EPA recently strengthened fine particulate matter standards, a step that will help provide protection from this health-harming pollutant.

 

The study, Increasing racial and ethnic disparities in ambient air pollution–attributable morbidity and mortality in the United States, was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives on March 6, 2024. NASA funded the research.

 

Watch a video of GW researcher Gaige Kerr talking about the study.

 

-GW-

 

END


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Communities of color across the US suffer a growing burden from polluted air Communities of color across the US suffer a growing burden from polluted air 2 Communities of color across the US suffer a growing burden from polluted air 3

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Can you tell AI-generated people from real ones?

2024-03-06
If you recently had trouble figuring out if an image of a person is real or generated through artificial intelligence (AI), you're not alone.  A new study from University of Waterloo researchers found that people had more difficulty than was expected distinguishing who is a real person and who is artificially generated.  The Waterloo study saw 260 participants provided with 20 unlabeled pictures: 10 of which were of real people obtained from Google searches, and the other 10 generated by Stable Diffusion or DALL-E, two commonly used AI programs that generate ...

Innovation in the skies: Breakthrough in UAV-driven engineering inspections

Innovation in the skies: Breakthrough in UAV-driven engineering inspections
2024-03-06
In a groundbreaking study published in Engineering, a collaborative team of researchers from Shanghai University and international experts have unveiled a cutting-edge approach to optimizing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) inspection routes and schedules for engineering projects. The research, led by Lu Zhen, Zhiyuan Yang, Gilbert Laporte, Wen Yi, and Tianyi Fan, introduces an innovative mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model combined with a variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithm, constructing a new approach in the field of engineering management. The rapid development and adoption of UAV technology have opened new horizons for various industries, particularly ...

How to conduct a Human-Robot Interaction experiment

How to conduct a Human-Robot Interaction experiment
2024-03-06
Basic Human–Robot Interaction by Dr David O Johnson offers practical guidance and insights for conducting experiments in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) and publishing the results in scientific journals. It includes a detailed explanation of how to conduct an HRI experiment and what to do and what not to do to get an article accepted for publication. It is tailored to those seeking to deepen their understanding of HRI methodologies, statistical measurements, and research design. The book begins with an overview of HRI, unravelling the basics of how robots function, with a specific focus on the verbal and non-verbal aspects of influencing their interactions ...

Unveiling the sun from behind the clouds: Reshaping the chemical image resolution

Unveiling the sun from behind the clouds: Reshaping the chemical image resolution
2024-03-06
Raman spectral preprocessing Raman spectroscopy detects the molecular bond information of the chemical components of the sample in situ in a non-destructive and label-free manner (Terms >>>). It is an emerging metabolic-related spectromics technology in biological and clinical medical research and is expected to promote the evolution of precision medicine. At present, Raman spectroscopy is applied in biomedical detections of body fluids, exosomes, cells/microbes, and tissues, among which Raman ...

How do we control the size and shape of pores in 3D scaffolds?

How do we control the size and shape of pores in 3D scaffolds?
2024-03-06
This article was directed and written by Dr. Lucía Pérez Sánchez, Ldi. Misael A. Ortiz de la O, Dr. Marco Antonio Álvarez Pérez and Dr. Janeth Serrano Bello (Laboratorio de Bioingeniería de Tejidos, División de Estudios de Posgrado e Investigación, Facultad de Odontología, UNAM) Dra. Monserrat Llaguno Munive (Laboratorio de Física Médica, Subdirección de Investigación Básica, Instituto Nacional de Cancerología) and Dr. Osmar A. Chanes Cuevas (Laboratorio de Investigación ...

Liquid lens based holographic camera for real 3D scene hologram acquisition using end-to-end physical model-driven network

Liquid lens based holographic camera for real 3D scene hologram acquisition using end-to-end physical model-driven network
2024-03-06
Holography technology can restore the complete light field information of the recorded object, which has important applications in fields like biological microscopic imaging and optical micromanipulation. One important frontier of holography is the reconstruction of realistic 3D scenes. However, the development and application of holographic technology have been hindered by the huge amount of data of the 3D scenes and the laser coherence, which leads to the slow capturing speed of the real 3D scenes ...

Visibility restoration for real-world hazy images via improved physical model and gaussian total variation

Visibility restoration for real-world hazy images via improved physical model and gaussian total variation
2024-03-06
Under real-world haze conditions, the captured images not only suffer from the haze but also are affected by the noise, which significantly deteriorates the visibility of images. However, most of existing haze removal methods mainly focus on the haze degradation and fail to consider the noise interference. To address the above issue, a research team led by Hailing XIONG and Yun LIU published their new research on 15 Feb 2024 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature. The team proposed a novel unified variational model consisting of multiple effective constraints that simultaneously ...

Breakthrough discovery will improve medical monitoring, preventive care for elephants

2024-03-06
SAN DIEGO–—Elephants are the natural carriers of a virus called Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpesvirus (EEHV) that can, for yet unknown reasons, cause profound clinical signs in some young elephants and be rapidly fatal. For nearly two decades, zoos and university partners have been working to study the virus and develop early detection protocols and treatment options. Veterinarians and clinical pathology researchers at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA) and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, have recently made an important discovery, now published in the March 2024 Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine. They found that population-based reference ...

Coaches can boost athletes’ mental health by being ‘authentic leaders’

2024-03-06
Sports coaches could strengthen athletes’ mental health and protect them from mental illness – by adopting an ‘authentic leadership’ style, a new study reveals. Researchers found when athletes perceived that their coach engaged in behaviours such as openly sharing information, showing understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, acting in an ethical manner, and listening to alternative perspectives, they felt happier and dealt with problems more easily. Publishing their findings today (6 March) in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, experts from the University of Birmingham reveal ...

Short-term exposure to high levels of air pollution kills 1 million globally every year

Short-term exposure to high levels of air pollution kills 1 million globally every year
2024-03-06
Every year, more than one million deaths globally occur because of exposure to short-term (hours to days) fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in air pollution, according to a new report, with Eastern Asia reporting more than 50% of deaths attributable to short-term PM2.5 globally. To date most studies have focused on the health impacts of living in cities where pollution levels are consistently high, ignoring the frequent “spikes” in pollution that can impact smaller urban areas that occur for instance landscape fires, dust, and other intermittent ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Using lightning to make ammonia out of thin air

Machine learning potential-driven insights into pH-dependent CO₂ reduction

Physician associates provide safe care for diagnosed patients when directly supervised by a doctor

How game-play with robots can bring out their human side

Asthma: patient expectations influence the course of the disease

UNM physician tests drug that causes nerve tissue to emit light, enabling faster, safer surgery

New study identifies EMP1 as a key driver of pancreatic cancer progression and poor prognosis

XPR1 identified as a key regulator of ovarian cancer growth through autophagy and immune evasion

Flexible, eco-friendly electronic plastic for wearable tech, sensors

Can the Large Hadron Collider snap string theory?

Stuckeman professor’s new book explores ‘socially sustainable’ architecture

Synthetic DNA nanoparticles for gene therapy

New model to find treatments for an aggressive blood cancer

Special issue of Journal of Intensive Medicine analyzes non-invasive respiratory support

T cells take aim at Chikungunya virus

Gantangqing site in southwest China yields 300,000-year-old wooden tools

Forests can’t keep up: Adaptation will lag behind climate change

Sturgeon reintroduction initiative yields promising first-year survival rate

Study: Babies’ poor vision may help organize visual brain pathways

Research reveals Arctic region was permafrost-free when global temperatures were 4.5˚ C higher than today

Novel insights into chromophobe renal cell carcinoma biology and potential therapeutic strategies

A breakthrough in motor safety: AI-powered warning system enhances capability to uncover hidden winding faults

Research teases apart competing transcription organization models

Connect or reject: Extensive rewiring builds binocular vision in the brain

Benefits and risks: informal use of antibiotics to prevent sexually transmitted infections on the rise in key populations in the Netherlands

New molecular tool sheds light on how cancer cells repair telomeres

First large-scale stem cell bank enables worldwide studies on genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease

Hearing devices significantly improve social lives of those with hearing loss

CNIC scientists reveal how the cellular energy system evolved—and how this knowledge could improve the diagnosis of rare genetic diseases

AI sharpens pathologists' interpretation of tissue samples

[Press-News.org] Communities of color across the US suffer a growing burden from polluted air
Study finds minoritized communities endure nearly 8 times higher rates of pediatric asthma and 1.3 times higher risk of dying prematurely from exposure to pollutants