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London Smog of 1952
On Friday (July 8), NPR's Marketplace's Scott Tong [marketplace.org] reported on the lingering effects of the worst smog event in history. From his article:
Four thousand people died, though blurry-eyed Londoners didn't even know until undertakers started to run out of coffins. Now, some longer-term effects are in, as far as asthma.
"We look at kids at many different ages at the time of the event," said University of California-San Diego economist Prashant Bharadwaj, lead author of the study in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. "And what we find is the largest effects in terms of exposure to the smog is if the kids who are exposed are particularly young. And by young, I mean less than one year of age or even in utero."
In the study, the youngest Londoners turned out to be five times more likely to have asthma. Nearly 25 percent of those in London during the Great Smog reported having asthma; those not in the city at the time reported a 5 percent rate.
ScienceDaily [sciencedaily.com] reports on the research findings with a link [thoracic.org] to the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
Describing the economic consequences of the smog-induced asthma, Tong says:
[...] Environmental economist Sylvia Brandt at the University of Massachusetts has found that children with asthma have mothers who quit the workforce 18 percent of the time.
"They miss out not only on the days that they would miss during the asthma exacerbations, but they actually miss out on a career of earnings," Brandt said. "And that changes their future wages that they could earn. It also changes how much they can save for retirement."
That's just a numeric way to tally the cost. One study of air pollution in general is that it claims 6.5 million lives around the world every year; that's more than HIV and malaria combined. Air pollution also has been shown to shorten lives in Chinese and Indian cities, by at least 3.5 years.
Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago says, "I believe air pollution is likely the greatest risk to human health out there today, more so than war, more so than malaria, more so than all the things we generally focus on."
