Study Links PM2.5 To Mortality Rates In The North

By Michelle Cyr-Whiting

Today’s Better Air Symposium hosted by PACHA at the Coast Inn of the North

Prince George, B.C. -  It is the scientific data many clean air advocates have been waiting for -- an estimate on mortality rates due to air pollution in B.C.’s North and Interior.

At today’s Better Air Symposium, Dr. Catherine Elliott gave a toll, "Approximately 20 deaths per year, plus or minus a margin of error, are attributable to air pollution here."

Health officials have known the adverse effects of fine particulate matter for years, but pinning numbers to the problem has been more difficult to establish, given the small population base in the region.  (click here, for previous story)

Dr. Elliott’s findings are in a study she recently co-authored for the B.C. Centre For Disease Control, which looked at the relationship between mortality rates and air pollution that has been derived in large cohort studies -- 50 cities with populations of 500,000 people or more, over 10 years.

"And we used those estimates of the relationship and applied them to the measured mortalilty and the measured particulate here."

Dr. Elliott says, "The trouble with air pollution is that people don’t come into the emergency room suffering from ’air pollution’, so we can’t count it."  As a result, she says, the data must be pulled from these larger epidemiological studies where a direct correlation can be drawn to figure out the impact, locally.

Elliott says similar difficulties occurred when health experts first tried to link smoking and alcohol to mortality rates.

Email | Print | Facebook | Twitter | Digg | Del.icio.us