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FOXFAN CENTRAL Smoggy Statistics Thursday, November 18, 2004 By Steven Milloy ARCHIVE Increases in air pollution caused by cars, power plants and industry can be directly linked to higher death rates in US cities, a study said, reported Reuters this week. The Reuters reporter, I suppose, had no hope of taking the studys result s to task (as they beg to be) since she was undoubtedly hypnotized by th e ostensible prestige of the journal in which the study was published t he Nov. But had the reporter been able to go beyond simple regurgitation of the s tudys press release, Reuters might well have reported Researchers tri ed to scare public with statistical malpractice. The researchers compared the non-injury-related death rates and smog meas urements for 95 urban areas for the period 1987-2000. They reported a on e-half percent (05 percent) increase in premature death (mortality) per 10-part per billion increase in ground-level ozone (smog) in the urban areas. Reducing smog levels by 35 percent, they claim, could save about 4,000 lives per year. While no one likes smog and all of us would like to see smog levels reduc ed where possible, we shouldnt let that fact amount to critical immunit y for flawed research or for anything goes conclusions like these.
First, if smog is deadly in New York City, then it should be deadly every where. But even granting the researchers every benefit of the doubt with respect to the validity of their analysis, among the 95 urban areas inc luded in the study, the correlation between smog and mortality is only s tatistically meaningful in five of those 95 urban areas (New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Dallas-Ft. That means in 95 percent of the urban areas studied, there was no meaning ful correlation between smog and mortality. Its simply not credible that smog would be a killer in five particular c ities, but nowhere else. But, of course, Im not going to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt with their analysis.
search) is fundamentally incapable of linking smog with m ortality. Not a single death was specifically linked by the researchers to smog. In no case was there a medical finding that anyones death was, in fact, c aused by smog. The researchers have no idea how much smog to which any o f the people in the study were exposed. Rather, the researchers only compared, on a very macro level, urban death rates and urban smog levels. They did not look to see whether individua ls exposed to higher levels of smog had greater rates of premature death after ruling out all other likely risk factors for premature death. It is taught in Epidemiology 101 that ecologic studies are very crude too ls that, at best, may be used to develop ideas for further research. Jonathan Samet, one of the authors, once discouraged the use of ecologic studies, writing in the journal Health Physics that, The methodologic l imitations inherent in the ecologic method may substantially bias ecolog ic estimates of risk. The studys reported increase in risk of 052 percent per 10 ppb of smog is laughably small so small that it probably could not be reliably ide ntified by the researchers.
are considered small and u sually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, stat istical bias or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not ev ident. The smog studys reported increase in risk is less than 1 percen t 100 times less than a minimally reliable level. This study, in reality, reported no association between smog levels typic ally found in US urban areas and mortality. Whats really going here is yet another example of a US Environmental P rotection Agency-funded ongoing effort to churn out one junk science-fue led alarm after another regarding air quality. The purpose is to grease the skids for the EPA to issue more stringent air quality regulations in the future standards that provide the agency with more power over sta tes. Federal funding of state highway projects, after all, is tied to wh ether states meet the EPAs air quality standards. Oh, and did I mention that the EPAs standards tend to be costly the ag encys last round of rules issued in 1997 is estimated to cost $100 bill ion per year when fully implemented and produce few, if any, measurabl e public health benefits? There is no argument that smog can be very unpleasant, and in some situat ions, smog may have adverse health effects on some vulnerable parts of c ity populations in EPA-speak, these people are flippantly referred to as elderly, urban, and asthmatic joggers. That said, there isnt any e vidence that the levels of smog experienced in the US today are killin g anyone once you clear up the smoggy statistics, that is.
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