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DUMB ASS Scarborough is breathless in CA- they can't BREATHE- no air !



 
 
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Old May 30th 06, 01:07 PM posted to alt.collecting.8-track-tapes
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Default DUMB ASS Scarborough is breathless in CA- they can't BREATHE- no air !

http://www.laweekly.com/index.php?op...8130& Itemid=

We don't have "smog doctors" here finding clear and present dangers- in
our air !

you live in a polluted ******** !



The Smog DoctorJohn Peters and the science of children and dirty air

By JUDITH LEWIS
Thursday, September 22, 2005 - 12:00 am

Photo by Larry Hirshowitz
When he came out from New England to live under the slowly clearing
skies of Los Angeles in 1980, Dr. John Peters, like most newcomers,
started thinking about smog. He wondered what permanent damage air
pollution was doing to Southern Californians' lungs. "I kept
asking, 'Why doesn't somebody study the chronic effects of air
pollution?'" says Peters, now a professor at the Keck School of
Medicine and director of the Southern California Health Sciences Center
at the University of Southern California. "Everybody knows air
pollution makes your eyes water, and it makes you cough. And if
that's all it does, well, maybe you get over that and it's not so
bad. But if there are chronic effects, then we ought to know, and we
really ought to be concerned."

Until that point, Peters had focused almost exclusively on workplace
exposure to toxins; throughout the 1980s, the Harvard-educated
professor of preventative medicine authored papers on lung cancer in
welders and kidney cancer in architects, and he had no intention of
shifting his course: "I kept saying a study of the chronic effects of
air pollution should be done," he says, "but I never thought I'd
be the one to do it."

Then, in 1991, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) put out a call
for just such a study, and Peters, along with a group of researchers
"who had been agitating about it," including his USC colleagues W.
James Gauderman and Ed Avol, answered it. With the help of some of the
world's best health-outcome people, a raft of environmentally minded
statisticians and experts in "exposure assessment," the team came
up with a plan of study. CARB accepted the proposal, and in 1993,
Peters became the director of The Children's Health Study, which
began with lung tests of nearly 4,000 fourth-, seventh- and
10th-graders in 12 geographically diverse communities - some inhaling
the region's worst pollutants, some breathing air as clean as it
comes.

At the outset, Peters suspected the results would be useful, at best,
to health-care *professionals. He and his peers didn't expect to make
the national news, and they didn't know that their study would become
among the most comprehensive, long-term analyses of the effects of air
pollution on the developing lungs of children.

Keep Reading



"As good scientists we were bound to be open-minded and accept
whatever we found, but we did not anticipate anything dramatic," says
Peters, sitting at a table in his second-floor office at the Southern
California Environmental Health Sciences Center at the University of
California. His office is spare and white but for a few bottles of fine
red wine - "I like wine," he admits. He has just turned 70. He is
tall and thin with a neatly trimmed white beard, and has the look of a
man who has paid meticulous attention to his health. He watches his
language just as carefully, and speaks with the exactness of a
researcher who's loathe to exaggerate. "Given that the air is so
much cleaner than it used to be, I thought if there were any effects
they would be subtle and perhaps not even clinically significant."

Some 75 published research papers later, here's what Peters and his
team found: That the lungs of children growing up among the industrial
warehouses of Mira Loma develop up to 10 percent more slowly than those
of their peers in the much cleaner air of Lompoc; that school absences
for conditions like wheezing and sore throats shoot up - sometimes
nearly double - as ozone levels soar in the Inland Empire; that, due
to high levels of nitrogen oxide and fine particulate matter, mostly
from internal combustion engines, nearly five times as many high-school
graduates in Upland as teenagers in Santa Maria suffer from lung
function far below normal - a developmental deficit, the study
concluded, from which these young people may never recover.

As a good scientist, Peters won't say he was shocked. "But I was
surprised," he allows. "We were all surprised the effects were as
significant as they are. It's the same sort of functional impairment
we see from smoking."

The Children's Health Study recruited another 2,000 10-year-olds in
1996, bringing the total number of children observed by the researchers
close to 6,000, drawn from communities - from Lancaster to San Dimas,
Lake Arrowhead to Lake Elsinore - that were carefully selected for
contrasts in air quality as well as high rates of education and
home-ownership, what Peters calls "indices of stability" as
reported in the 1990 census. The stability factor reduced the
possibility that poor nutrition and social stress were contributing to
high rates of respiratory illness: Unlike so many other environmental
problems, often heavily concentrated in poorer areas, air pollution
transcends class. "It turns out that there isn't a high correlation
between regional pollution and socioeconomic level," says Peters.
"Upland is a very upper-class community, and it's one of the most
polluted. And a lot of the lower socioeconomic-status communities -
Compton is a good example - are not bad in terms of air quality. The
air where I live, in San Marino, is probably worse."

The team of researchers also turned up more specific, and sometimes
eccentric, points: Ice skaters, for instance, have a
higher-than-average incidence of asthma due to high concentrations of
pollutants trapped in the cold air of indoor skating rinks. "Zambonis
might be the cause of that," says Peters. And according to a 2002
article published in Lancet, athletes in general suffer in higher
numbers from ozone pollution. "If you're exercising, you're
breathing up to 30 times as much as when you're sitting still, so
your exposure is magnified tremendously," says Peters. "The more
sports you play, the more exercise and the more pollutants you're
getting." As a consequence, the study found that teenagers who play
multiple team sports in high-ozone communities are more likely to
develop asthma than nonathletes. Where ozone levels are low, no such
correlation between exercise and asthma exists.

This was a startling discovery, says Dr. James Gauderman, who has
authored several key papers and overseen a team of data management
types on the Children's Health Study since 1996. "There's a lot
known about air pollution exacerbating existing asthma, but there has
not been a lot out there about air pollution causing asthma. Since we
had such a large group spread out across different towns with different
pollution profiles, we had a large enough sample that we could break it
down: We could look at kids playing no team sports, kids playing some
team sports and kids playing a lot of team sports. And it was really
only in that one group - kids playing a lot of team sports in a
high-ozone community - that we saw an increased risk of new cases."
Because it's such a unique result, it can't be confirmed until
another research team replicates it. "But if it holds up," says
Gauderman, "it could have some ramifications in terms of how we
counsel young athletes on when to play sports. We could tailor their
activity so it's not happening during peak ozone times."

Those "high-ozone communities" include the cities of Lancaster and
Lake Arrowhead, where ozone rises on summer afternoons to levels twice
as high as it is in the San Luis Obispo County town of Atascadero, and
five or six times higher than Honolulu or Seattle. Fine particulate
matter, or PM2.5, which the study has linked to long-term lung
impairment - and which other investigations have linked to cancer -
is found in concentrations three times higher in Long Beach than in
Lompoc.

So what happened to the notion that the air in Southern California is
steadily improving? "In general pollution has gotten better," says
Peters, "but you have to remember that it's only the things we're
measuring that are getting better. Other things, like gas formulations,
are changing - diesel technology being the big one. So if you're
measuring ozone and you're measuring NO2, then in some ways things
are improving. If you're paying attention to particles, in some
areas, things may be getting worse."

Dissatisfied with the existing air-quality measurements as provided by
the EPA, the Children's Health Study researchers went about setting
up 12 air-quality monitoring stations to measure PM10 and 2.5 (large
and fine particulate matter), nitrogen oxides, ozone and acid vapor.
"We established a sampler that took a two-week sample for PM2.5. That
began in 1994. So we probably had as much information on fine particles
coming from our study as there was available anywhere else," says
Peters. "The way you measure particles is to collect them on a filter
and weigh them. Big particles, what we call PM10, weigh more than
little particles. And what's happened with diesel technology is that
you don't have the big particles - you don't see the big black
stuff coming out as much as you used to - but you have more of the
ultrafine particles [PM2.5]. They don't weigh very much, so it seems
like there's less to worry about. But it's not true: Biologically
those ultrafine particles are probably more significant and more
dangerous to inhale."

They are also responsible for the bulk of air pollution's
public-health costs. Five years ago, in a study called "Multiple Air
Toxics Exposure Study in the South Coast Air Basin," the South Coast
Air Quality Management District established that diesel particulate
matter accounts for 70 percent of the state's cancer risk from
airborne pollutants. And while the Environmental Working Group, a
D.C.-based nonprofit, estimates the public-health impact of ozone at
$521 million, measured in school absences and emergency-room visits, a
Union of Concerned Scientists study recently set the costs of diesel
particulate matter at a staggering $21.5 billion.

Beyond the hard, cold figures, there remains the stark reality that
diminished lung function may be a precursor for emphysema, chronic
bronchitis and possibly even lung cancer later in life. "There's a
connection that's not clearly established," says Peters, "but
what we do know is that if you have low lung function as an adult, on
the average your life is going to be shorter. You're going to be more
likely to die of heart disease or lung disease. So the assumption is
that if it's happening at 18 years old it's going to do the same
thing to you when you're an adult." We are, in essence, dooming
children in smoggy areas to a lifetime of health problems, the genesis
of which lies almost exclusively with our dirty cars and trucks.

In the wake of a 2004 article in The New England Journal of Medicine
establishing the link between reduced lung volume and childhood
exposure to air pollution, the Children's Health Study received
nationwide attention: It provided, finally, an unassailable testament
to the lethal consequences of continuing air pollution. It established
methodically documented physical evidence that air pollution inhibits
the healthy development of children's lungs. In a summary of the
studies, "Breathless in Los Angeles: The Exhausting Search for Clean
Air" - a title Peters wrote himself - the authors recommend
mitigating measures: Install air-filtration systems in schools, locate
parks, day-care centers and sports fields away from high-traffic
thoroughfares, supplement at-risk children's diets with vitamin C to
fight the oxidizing effects of dirty air. They also acknowledge the
drawbacks of almost any secondary solution: Vitamin C may actually be a
pro-oxidant and air conditioning increases energy consumption and
therefore emissions from power plants. Even moving to a cleaner-air
community isn't ideal. If everyone moves to Ventura and works in
downtown Los Angeles, air poisoned by traffic congestion will
eventually be impossible to escape. "This isn't like dietary fat,
where you can tell an individual to cut down," says Gauderman.
"It's an exposure that's all around us, and if you live in
Southern California, there's no way to avoid it." The only real
solution, he concludes, is to "keep the pressure up to regulate and
reduce pollution levels generally." In other words, mandate more
fuel-efficient vehicles - something California struggles to do
against continuing legal threats from the auto manufacturers' lobby.

I tell Peters it seems that there should have been more alarm over the
results of the Children's Health Study. "It does, doesn't it?"
he says. "I don't know what has to happen. Maybe we need a Cindy
Sheehan of air pollution camping out in Sacramento."

Recently, Penny Newman, executive director of the Center for Community
Action and Environmental Justice, enlisted Peters in her group's
battle to stop the building of warehouses on 700 acres in Mira Loma, a
small rural community where air quality has deteriorated due to a glut
of industrial development. "Dr. Peters actually came to [Riverside
County] Board of Supervisor meetings," says Newman. "He explained
the significance of what they had found in the study, and its direct
impact on Mira Loma. He made it so it wasn't a theoretical thing
anymore." But she laments that the Children's Health Study has not
had a more sweeping regulatory impact - it has not, for example,
halted the state's plan to expand the ports without stricter
air-quality controls. "I remember years ago we'd have officials
saying, 'We can't make public-policy issues without sound
science.' Now we have sound science. Nobody has picked it apart. Yet
we're continuing with policies that are in direct conflict with the
science."

Until those policies change and the problem of Southern California air
quality is solved, Peters intends to keep collecting data - he'd
like to see the Children's Health Study carry on well into the next
half-century. "We'll follow these subjects into their 20s, and even
their 30s," he says, "to see the long-term effects." One theory
is that men's lungs will recover in adulthood, since male lungs grow
long after female lungs stop growing, at around age 18. Another is that
the damage remains for life. "That's something we won't know for
a decade," says Peters. "But we plan to figure it out."

The study's goals were somewhat stymied when two school districts -
one of the dirtiest, Mira Loma, and one of the cleanest, Lompoc -
refused to continue in the study, citing more pressing educational
concerns than testing lung function. But new children have been
recruited, and the dollars that stopped coming from CARB in 2004 have
been replaced with a seven-year, $17 million grant from the National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Peters is confident
there's much more to learn. "Who knows when this will ever end?"
he says. "There's always more to know."

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