Air Pollution

By Bryan Walsh – Time Asia – December 13, 2004

FACT: There are no concrete studies that directly link asthma to air pollution. The asthma rate in heavily polluted Beijing is actually lower than the rate in Hong Kong, which is itself lower than in many cleaner cities. But asthmatics who move to polluted cities do find themselves at greater risk. “There’s no question that once you have asthma, you’re more vulnerable to air pollution,” says Dr. Anthony Hedley of the University of Hong Kong.

HARBOUR TUNNELS
The high toll of price distortion

ROBERT WILSON

27 Jul, 2004

Published in the SCMP:

Excessively low tolls at the Cross-Harbour Tunnel are distorting traffic patterns, adding to congestion, increasing pollution and health costs, and providing invalid justification for plans to build more roads along the harbourfront.

Of the three harbour tunnels, the Cross-Harbour Tunnel provides the highest number of convenient connections, the Eastern Harbour Crossing the second-highest number of convenient connections, and the Western Harbour Crossing the fewest.

In a market economy, the price of a product or service reflects supply and demand. Under free market conditions, Cross-Harbour Tunnel tolls would be the highest, with the Western Harbour Crossing charging the least. The reverse is actually the case, and the Cross-Harbour Tunnel is causing the distortion.

Since its opening in 1972, its tolls have not kept up with inflation. In 1972, private cars paid $5. They now pay $20, but the inflation-adjusted toll should be $36. Taxis paid $5 in 1972 and now pay only $10, but their toll, too, should be $36. Heavy-goods vehicles originally paid $20. They now pay $30, but should be paying $144. Amazingly, buses pay virtually the same as in 1972, and the average bus passenger contributes less than 25 cents.

The Cross-Harbour Tunnel is government-owned. It is a public asset and operating profit helps keep our taxes down. Only users benefit from artificially low tolls and there is no justification for them to be subsidised by the rest of the community, or for us to suffer the increased congestion, noise, air pollution and health costs resulting from the consequent elevated traffic volume. The community is entitled to hold the government accountable for failing to charge enough for the use of this publicly owned asset. Cross-Harbour Tunnel tolls should be raised to inflation-adjusted levels at least, so that the element of subsidy is removed.

Allowing the tunnels to openly compete and set their tolls according to supply and demand is another possibility to be considered.

Apart from inflating traffic volume on each side of the central harbour, unfair competition from the Cross-Harbour Tunnel adversely affects the entire public transport system, depressing fares and causing other problems.

Total vehicular traffic volume is increased. More cross-harbour journeys take place. More people choose to live and work on opposite sides of the harbour, and ultra-low-cost public transport encourages people to live at a greater distance from where they work, further increasing traffic volume. If Cross-Harbour Tunnel tolls were raised to inflation-adjusted levels and tolls at other tunnels were lowered, traffic volume would drop at the Cross-Harbour Tunnel and increase at the others. The total number of individual cross-harbour road journeys would decrease and traffic volume, noise and air pollution would reduce in areas near the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.

Another obvious strategy is to charge higher tolls at peak times. A heavy-goods vehicle pays the same whether it passes through the tunnel at the height of the rush hour, or at 3am. This does not conform to the principles of a market economy, where the price charged reflects supply and demand.

From time to time, the government has floated the idea of road pricing as a way of reducing traffic in central areas. Charging an appropriate price for the use of the Cross-Harbour Tunnel is the obvious place to begin. More importantly for the long term, where failure to implement appropriate tolls for tunnel use results in planning decisions to build more roads, error compounds error to the permanent detriment of the environment and the community. The government should ignore the lobbying of vested interest groups and do what is right for the community as a whole.

Robert Wilson is a financial consultant based in Hong Kong.

Birth Defect Studies

Impact of pollution on children

(our thanks to Louise Sandberg )

This article includes a Hong Kong study showing that children from polluted areas have lower lung capacities (Spring 2003):

from the article:

– In a Czech Republic study, researchers examined births and air pollution levels in 67 districts. Women exposed to sulfur dioxide (created when sulfur-rich fuels like coal and diesel are burned), especially in their first trimester, had higher numbers of both low birth weight newborns and premature babies. Newborns of women exposed to total suspended particulate matter (soot, also a product of coal combustion) were also linked to low birth weight.(7)

– Exposure to sulfur dioxide also led to increased low-birth-weight newborns in a study of Boston, Philadelphia and four other northeastern cities, but so did carbon monoxide.(8) The link between carbon monoxide and low birth weight was also found in southern California.(9)

– All these pollutants-carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and total suspended particulate matter-were linked in Korea to newborns with increased low birth weight, and so was another, oxides of nitrogen (created by combustion, especially by power plants and vehicle engines).(10) Scientists compared 276,763 births to pollution levels collected from 21 monitoring sites, where, as was the case in California and the Northeast cities, motor vehicles were the dominant sources of pollution.

USA: January 1, 2002

WASHINGTON – Women exposed to air pollution during pregnancy are more likely to give birth to children with heart defects, researchers reported on Saturday.

They said their study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, is the first definitively to link air pollution with birth defects.

“There seems to be something in the air that can harm developing fetuses,” Beate Ritz, an epidemiologist who headed the study, said in a statement.

The team, at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Health and the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program, said the two pollutants they measured were carbon monoxide and ozone – produced by the city’s well-known traffic jams.

“The greater a woman’s exposure to one of these two pollutants in the critical second month of pregnancy, the greater the chance that her child would have one of these serious cardiac birth defects,” Ritz said.

“More research needs to be done, but these results present the first compelling evidence that air pollution may play a role in causing some birth defects.”

Ritz’s team compared air pollution monitoring data from the Environmental Protection Agency with information from the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program – a statewide database on birth defects.

They looked at 9,000 babies born from 1987 to 1993. Pregnant women who were exposed to the highest levels of ozone and carbon monoxide because their homes were close to busy freeways were three times as likely to have a child with certain heart defects as women breathing the cleanest air.

The defects they found were specific – conotruncal heart defects, pulmonary artery/valve defects and aortic artery/valve defects, which can require open-heart surgery to save the baby. No other birth defects were linked with the pollution.

SOMETHING ELSE COULD BE THE CULPRIT

The researchers said it was not certain carbon monoxide and ozone were directly causing the defects. They could be a “marker” – something associated with the real cause.

“We’re not sure carbon monoxide is the culprit because it could be just a marker for something else in tailpipe exhaust,” Gary Shaw of the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program said in a statement.

“The fact that certain heart defects are turning up in the second month of pregnancy when hearts are being formed suggests something serious may be happening.”

Ritz said fine particles may be to blame. “We did a small study that showed ultrafine particles correlate extremely well with carbon monoxide,” she said in a telephone interview.

“When you move away from a freeway, 100 feet, 200 feet, you see the number of particles decrease very steeply. So does carbon monoxide.”

She said other researchers had shown that these ultrafine particles, which also come out of the tailpipes of cars, can carry toxic chemicals such as quinones and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). “They become a great delivery device for toxic agents,” Ritz said.

The same goes for ozone, which is generated when the sun cooks polluted air. The same process generates other chemicals, which are not measured.

“It’s easy as a knee-jerk reaction to say ‘Let’s get ozone down, let’s get carbon monoxide down.’ But if you are not doing anything to the other toxins, you might be on the wrong boat,” Ritz said.

Ritz said it also occurred to her that people living near freeways may also be poorer or have worse health in general, but said she factored that in. Some of the affected neighborhoods were actually very wealthy, she said.

She also looked at ethnicity and education level of the mothers and found no differences in the correlation between pollution and birth defects.

But she said they were unable to evaluate other potential risk factors for birth defects, including smoking, occupational exposures, vitamin supplement use, diet and obesity.

Story by Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

Story Date: 1/1/2002

Sunday, 30 December, 2001, 02:50 GMT: BBC News

Pollution linked to birth defects

Women exposed to high levels of ozone and carbon monoxide may be up to three times as likely to give birth to a baby with heart defects, American research suggests.

Scientists found the risk increased when women were exposed to high levels of the pollutants in the second month of their pregnancy.

That is the time when the heart and other organs begin to develop.

The research team suggest this is the first “compelling evidence” air pollution may play a role in causing some birth defects.

The research was carried out at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Health and the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program (CBCMP)

Beate Ritz, a UCLA epidemiologist, who led the study, said: “The greater a woman’s exposure to one of these two pollutants in the critical second month of pregnancy, the greater the chance that her child would have one of these serious cardiac birth defects.”

Previous research by the same team has linked air pollution to harmful effects on pregnancy, including giving birth prematurely and low birth-weight babies.

Ozone gas is present in photochemical smog – produced by chemical reaction under ultraviolet light from the Sun.

Carbon monoxide is a colourless, odourless gas produced as a by-product of combustion – in vehicle exhaust fumes, for example.

Air quality checks

The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, looked at information on more than 9,000 babies born between 1987 and 1993 in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties from the CBCMP.

They compared air quality near the children’s homes to that in the areas where healthy children lived, using measurements from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

They found that pregnant women who were exposed to increased levels of ozone and carbon monoxide faced an higher risk of having a child with conotruncal heart defects – a group of severe heart problems, pulmonary artery or valve defects and aortic artery or valve defects.

Women who lived in areas with the highest levels of the pollutants had three times the risk of those living in areas with the cleanest air.

For women who lived in areas with moderately higher pollution, the risk of birth defects doubled.

This group of heart defects occurs 1.76 times per 1,000 births. Many babies need open-heart surgery before age one.

Cause for concern

Dr Ritz said: “These findings show that there are more health problems caused by air pollution than solely asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

“There seems to be something in the air that can harm developing foetuses.”

She added that although there had been a significant in ozone and carbon monoxide levels, there may be “secondary pollutants” occurring alongside the gases which were not yet measured or understood, and which could themselves pose health risks.

Gary Shaw of the CBCMP, who also worked on the research admitted: “We¿re not sure carbon monoxide is the culprit because it could be just a marker for something else in tailpipe exhaust.

“The fact that certain heart defects are turning up in the second month of pregnancy when hearts are being formed suggests something serious may be happening.

He called for further research: “Unlike other health factors like diet or lifestyle, a pregnant woman has almost no control over the quality of air she breathes – we need answers.”

The researchers admit the study is limited because it could only assess pregnant women’s exposure to pollutants by checking measurements of certain pollutants at monitoring stations, which could be up to 10 miles away.

They were also unable to look at other risk factors for birth defects, including maternal smoking, occupational exposures, vitamin supplement use, diet and obesity.