It’s Everyone’s Air, Mr. Bush
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion, more than a decade ago, that breathing someone else’s cigarette smoke can cause cancer galvanized support for passage of tough anti-smoking laws in California and nationwide. Let’s hope a new study forging a clear link between exposure to soot and lung cancer also prompts swift political action, the most significant of which would be a reversal by President Bush of his administration’s unhealthy effort to weaken air quality rules.
The study, released Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., finds that breathing air containing microscopic particles of soot or dust over a long period greatly increases the risk of dying of lung cancer or other lung or heart diseases. Many city residents who inhale air laden with these particles face a risk of developing fatal lung cancer similar to the risk faced by those living with a smoker.
Earlier studies have hinted at this link. But this latest research, a team effort led by George D. Thurston at the New York University School of Medicine, is far more compelling because it follows a large sample--500,000 individuals--over a long period, 16 years.
The tiny particles swirling over American cities have long bedeviled air quality officials. They come from diesel trucks and buses, farm equipment, power plant smokestacks, dust blowing off unpaved roads and portable generators. Invisible to the naked eye, these specks can float in the air for weeks and bypass the body’s defenses to lodge deep in the lungs. Until recent years, lower-emitting diesel engines and traps to contain particle emissions from older engines weren’t commercially available.
In 1999, the EPA adopted tougher standards for diesel engines, requiring that they spew far fewer particles. But those rules don’t take effect until 2007. In the meantime, the Bush administration is trying to block rules that require utilities to tighten pollution controls when they modernize power plants.
In California, there is both good news and bad. The state has some of the highest particle pollution levels in the nation due in part to the many valleys ringed by mountains that trap particle-laden haze. On the other hand, officials with the South Coast Air Quality Management District are now requiring local governments to gradually replace their belching trash trucks, buses and street sweepers with cleaner natural gas vehicles. State funds help underwrite the cost of these new vehicles.
Lung cancer is often hideously painful and sometimes as terrifying as drowning, as lungs eaten away by renegade tumors strain for a taste of oxygen they’re no longer able to process. The latest study argues powerfully for redoubled federal action to control this cause of disease, not for cutting corporate polluters more regulatory slack.
