Illustration: Brian Stauffer
Up in the Air
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mailAgainst a backdrop of weakened federal regulations, Boston College’s Global Observatory on Pollution and Health will conduct a study of how air pollution contributes to death and illness, and to cognitive loss among children in Massachusetts.
The study, supported by an $80,000 grant from the Barr Foundation, will be the first to compile such data on a municipality-by-municipality basis, said Observatory Director and Professor of Biology Philip Landrigan, MD, who is the principal investigator on the project. (This observatory is the debut initiative of BC’s Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, the centerpiece of a 155,000-square-foot research center currently under construction and slated to open next year.)
In 2017, despite strong state-based pollution controls, air pollution caused an estimated 1,546 deaths in Massachusetts. And across the world, air pollution accounts for 5 million premature deaths a year, according to findings from a landmark 2017 report of the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, which Landrigan cochaired.
“That’s a lot of preventable deaths,” Landrigan said. “If we can detail the magnitude of the problem for a particular city or town—identifying deaths, or lost IQ points in children—we think that is going to stimulate action. We want people to understand the risks and bring it home so it is not something that is abstract.”
Since the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970, air pollution has decreased across the United States. But according to the grant proposal, the control of air pollution in the country has stalled in the three-plus years since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, due to a series of regulatory rollbacks that have weakened environmental standards and shredded health protections. As a result, deaths related to air pollution have begun to tick up across the U.S., Landrigan said, with the largest increases in Midwestern and Southern states that lead in coal mining, oil drilling, and natural gas extraction.
Working in partnership with Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School neuropsychologist David Bellinger, Landrigan and his team will conduct a geographically based epidemiologic analysis of disease, disability, premature death, and decreased longevity due to air pollution across Massachusetts. Landrigan hopes the report can influence policymakers by identifying connections between stationary and mobile sources of pollution and proven scientific solutions to reduce pollution—a “winnable battle,” as the 2017 Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health concluded.
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