Smog daze

A growing body of research is shedding light on a dirty issue: the connection between poor air quality and a litany of respiratory health problems. Who is most at risk? Children

By Sarah Scott

During the first week of October 2005, at the end of a record-breaking summer of smog alerts in Ontario, an invisible cloud of ozone gas drifted over the little village of Scotland, Ontario, 100 kilometres southwest of Toronto. You could not see it or smell it. Mary Dinner, for one, didn’t even know it had arrived. She had moved with her husband and two daughters a few years earlier to the quiet farming village amid fields of corn, tobacco and beans. In that first week of October, life seemed tranquil as usual. The sun was shining, and the weather was hot and humid — a final burst of summer. It seemed like a fine time for Mary’s 13-year-old daughter, Katie, to try out for the school soccer team. Katie, a slight, blond-haired Grade 8 student, loved athletics — especially cheerleading and track — and rarely let her asthma get in the way.

So Katie went off, eager to try out for the team. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, Mary received a frightening phone call from the school. Katie was on the field, gasping for air, as if she were breathing through a straw after a sprint. By the time Mary rushed to school with the puffer her daughter had forgotten at home, she suspected what the problem was: the fumes in the air. Excessive air pollution, Mary remembered, always triggered breathing difficulty for Katie.

“You’d think it would be better in the country,” Mary said later. Most people would agree, but on many days, ozone levels are higher in villages like Scotland (population about 600) than in downtown Toronto. Ground-level ozone is created when fumes from coal plants, vehicles and industry mingle in the sun, and it can aggravate asthma, provoke asthma attacks and send asthmatic children to the hospital. There is no escaping it: dirty air rides in with the winds from the coal-fired plants of the Ohio Valley to pollute the air outside your home and school and jeopardize your children’s health.

Katie’s story is just one example of how pollution is harming children’s health in Ontario and around the world. A growing body of research reveals that air pollution, ozone in particular, exacerbates respiratory illnesses like bronchitis, impairs lung function, stunts lung growth and increases the risk of infant death. According to new research from California, high ozone levels may even be causing asthma. While it is too early to say for sure, the new study points to the very real possibility that air pollution is at least partly to blame for a four-fold increase between 1978 and 1996 in the number of Canadian children diagnosed with asthma. (As of 1997, 12 percent of Canadian kids under 20 suffered from asthma.)

So much illness has a price tag. The Ontario Medical Association reports that in 2005, smog sent 1,430 children with respiratory ailments to an Ontario hospital bed, and another 3,858 young people with respiratory problems to the emergency room. That represents a significant chunk of the overall cost of smog in Ontario: an astounding $7.8 billion due to premature deaths, hospital admissions, emergency room visits and school absenteeism.

The heavy toll air pollution takes on the health of Ontarians, and in particular on children, has prompted Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government to order that the province’s four remaining coal-fired power plants, which supply 21.4 percent of Ontario’s electricity, be shut down by 2009. Coal-fired power plants, along with the metal smelting industry, are the two biggest sources of made-in-Ontario smog, according to Ontario’s Ministry of Environment. Yet this promise may be a hard one for the government to keep, since it is not clear how Ontario will replace the coal-generated 6,400 megawatts of relatively cheap electricity. Until alternative sources of energy are found, McGuinty’s government has indicated that it won’t shut down the coal plants. Environmentalists are, of course, still expecting the province to keep its promise, but coal is only part of the problem. Now a broad coalition of environmentalists and physicians is saying that government ought to do much more to reduce or even eliminate the damage that dirty air inflicts on children.

The impact of pollution in the air, water, food, soil and even consumer goods on the health of humans, especially children, is a new and challenging field of research. Children are far more vulnerable to the effects of pollution than are adults. A primer published last fall by the Canadian Partnership for Children’s Health and Environment — a coalition of 11 health and environmental organizations that includes Toronto Public Health, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, the Ontario College of Family Physicians, Pollution Probe, and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment — explains why: “Kilogram for kilogram of body weight, [children] eat more food, drink more water and breathe more air than will an adult.” Children play closer to the ground where dust settles. They have a longer life ahead to suffer the ill effects of pollution. Children’s vulnerabilities can be more subtle still. Infant skin, for example, is more permeable than is the skin of an adult. A baby’s lungs are not fully developed at birth; growing respiratory systems can become overburdened by toxic substances. The immune and digestive systems, as well as the liver and kidneys, are not fully developed at birth either. Some children are simply more at risk than others, either because of their genetic makeup or their socio-economic condition. Children who are poor are more likely to be exposed to health risks from roadways, industrial facilities and hazardous waste dumps than are their wealthier counterparts, the report notes. Children in the poor neighbourhoods of Toronto, for instance, are almost twice as likely to go to hospital for respiratory problems as kids living in the richest areas, according to Toronto Public Health.

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