Dr. John Dunn comments on the claim that poor air quality in London caused the tragic death of this child.
The op-ed was in yesterday’s New York Times.
Dr. Dunn’s comment is below.
###
Start with the fact that EPA researchers were unable to kill animals even with extreme exposures to small particles. Then they got no effects from their human experiments project that went on for 10 plus years and violated federal and international prohibitions on human experimentation. Their ozone human experiments were equally failed, even with high-level exposures in exercising subjects.
Then, all the small particle death research is nothing more than dredging death rates for a match with a bump up in air pollution measured by local monitors — so the temporal-spatial studies were tuned up to find “effects” in the day to day mortality. The result was small associations that could easily be produced by temporal and spatial data torturing. Big effects, robust effects were never found. Daily death rate variances, seasonal death rate variations, and temperature related variations were not eliminated as confounders. In fact, the “research” merely harvested the noise of daily death rate variations and called it a death signal. The research violated the Bradford Hill rules for establishing causation with epidemiological studies — violated them egregiously but still the claims made the news and became the “consensus” canard.
Asthma is an allergic disease. Small particle air pollution that is the target of this propaganda piece is not an allergen — i.e., they don’t cause asthma.
There are reasons why the autopsy didn’t mention air pollution as the cause of the girls respiratory disease.
The most important reason is that diesel and other industrial source small particles are not the cause of asthma. Asthma is an allergic disease and there are small particles — not regulated by any of the regulatory regimes — that are the cause. They are produced by natural sources — plants, animals, the environment — and are not industrial at all. But with the regulators, being environmentalists antagonistic to industrial fossil fuel use and committed to the argument that industry and human use of fossil fuels is lethal, we end up with journalists writing these pieces that confirm the junk science theories of the enviro researchers.
Asthma is caused by the the cellular and mediator reaction to contact with allergens, carbon based molecule detritus of natural processes–pollen production, animal and insect dander and offal and detritus–so the reactive airway disease is, no doubt triggered by an allergic reaction and then inflammation and airway spasm caused by the inflammatory process.
Diesel exhaust is not productive of allergens. Ozone is not an allergen. It is a 3-atom oxygen molecule with a short half life produces naturally by reactions of chemicals in the air.
Ozone experiments on humans have not shown to be the important factor. Even exposures to high levels of ozone combined with exercise don’t cause asthma attacks with the exception of individuals who are prone to exercise induced asthma. But that is not triggered by air pollution–it is triggered by exercise. There is another variant of asthma caused by exposure to cooler or cold air.
When will the sad story of asthma sufferers be properly attributed to the actual cause of asthma? Well that depends on when scientific medical research can explain the realities.
The recent decline in asthma is not well understood, but there was an increase in asthma at the same time ambient small particles and ozone declined — explain that if the toxicology theory of the enviros is correct.