News - Smog Pushes Death Rates Up in Canada's Cities...

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Smog Pushes Death Rates Up in Canada's Cities

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Reproduced from the Toronto Globe and Mail, May 30, 1998

Breathing the heavily polluted air in Canadian cities is deadly, according to a study conducted by three federal scientists. Polluted air is having a noticeable effect on rate at which people die: Mortality climbs measurably when smog is at its worst. Residents of Quebec City were most affected. The death rate there surged 11 per cent, from an average of 7.7 deaths a day to 8.6, during periods of high air pollution. Researchers were unsure why the increase was so marked.

The study also found higher mortality levels associated with dirty air in the other 10 cities investigated, which covered most of Canada's major urban areas and a total population of 10.8 million.

London at 10.6 per cent and Hamilton at 10.3 had the next largest increases in smog-induced mortality levels, while the smallest increases, 3.6 per cent, were found in Windsor and Edmonton.

Air pollution levels varied among the cities studied. No region had uniformly higher or lower levels of contaminants.

The study, described as one of the most extensive undertaken in the world, reviewed more than 800,000 deaths that occurred over an 11-year period and found that levels of common air pollutants, such as ozone and sulphur dioxide, are playing a role in when people die.

The researchers viewed it as further confirmation of the public health risk posed by smog. "Exposure to ambient air pollutants generated from the combustion of fossil fuels poses a public health risk to Canadians," they concluded.

"Risk of premature mortality was shown to be attributable to a mixture of gaseous air pollutants with positive risks detected in all 11 Canadian cities examined"

Until now, most air pollution research has focused on the death risk attributed only to the breathing of extremely small pollution particles, but this study looked at the effects of the broad soup of pollutants contained in city air.

"What people have found in cities all over North America, Europe and South America is that when air pollution is high more people die, and when air pollution is low fewer people die," said Richard Burnett, a scientist with the environmental health directorate of the federal Health Department and one of the authors of the study.

The study is to be published next month in the Canadian Journal of Public Health, and has been cited by the Health Department in a submission it made this month to the federal/provincial group reviewing ways Canadian gasoline could be reformulated to reduce the amount of air pollution it causes.

The researchers found that mortality rates in Canada could be reduced by cutting the amount of sulphur contained in gasoline to California levels. Although there have been some improvements in air quality in Canada because of pollution control measures adopted in the 1980s, there are concerns that increased gasoline use and restructuring of the electric power industry, a heavy fossil fuel user, will erode these gains...

For the other cities covered by the study, the increased risk of death during high pollution episodes was: Montreal 8.4 per cent, Ottawa 4.8, Toronto 6.5, Winnipeg 6.4, Calgary 9.7 and Vancouver 8.3.

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7/18/2007

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