Where a child lives can greatly affect his or her risk for asthma. According to a new study by scientists at Columbia University, neighborhood differences in rates of childhood asthma may be explained by varying levels of air pollution from trucks and residential heating oil.
Results appear online in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.
In New York City, where the study was conducted, asthma among school-age children ranges from a low of 3% to a high of 19% depending on the neighborhood, and even children growing up within walking distance of each other can have 2- to 3-fold differences in risk for asthma. Helping explain these disparities, the researchers found that levels of airborne black carbon, which mostly comes from incomplete combustion sources like diesel trucks and oil furnaces, were high in homes of children with asthma. They also reported elevated levels of black carbon within homes in neighborhoods with high asthma prevalence and high densities of truck routes and homes burning low-grade or “dirty” heating oil.
“This study adds to the evidence that further public health interventions on oil and truck emissions standards and the use of dirty oil may be warranted. This is especially timely as New York City considers regulations to further reduce the burning of low-grade oil for domestic heating,” says the study’s senior author, Matthew Perzanowski, PhD, associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health .
The study may be the first to show an association between airborne black carbon in the home and proximity to buildings burning dirty oil (low-grade, types 4 and 6). “Because of its history as a shipping and oil refining center, New York City burns more dirty oil for residential and commercial heating than any other city in the country,” says study co-author Steven Chillrud, PhD, Lamont Research Professor at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory . “These fuels produce more byproducts of incomplete combustion than cleaner oil or natural gas and contribute substantially to air pollution. Buildings that burn dirty oil are unevenly distributed throughout the city, which could help explain disparities in health.”
I call BS on this one. I lived next door to a trucking company and 3 blocks from a major 4 lane highway from the time I was born until my family moved to Florida when I was 18 and I’ve never had any breathing problems.
I second that BS … I had asthma growing up from the age of 5-15, played around diesel rigs for that period becuase of my fathers trucking business and yet the doctors who tested me said it was because I was born this way. I am now 35 years old and not an ounce of asthma. 3rd I am 2 miles from a major freeway, should I sell my house.
Low-quality heating oil and proximity to trucking correlate very well to poverty, which correlates to pretty much every negative thing that you can imagine