Category Archives: News

Wildfires raging in California, Oregon and Washington have led to some of the worst air quality in the world

Washington Post interviewed COEH Director Dr. Michael Jerrett for this piece.

SAN FRANCISCO — Every morning for the past few weeks, JoEllen Depakakibo has had a new kind of morning routine. She sets her alarm for 6 and opens the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow site on her phone. Newly fluent in the numbers of the air quality indexes, or the AQI, she checks the pollution levels compulsively throughout the day, waiting to make a difficult decision.

If the number passes 150, called “unhealthy” by the EPA, Depakakibo has her employees shut the main door and turn on a medical-grade air purifier inside Pinhole Coffee Shop, the cafe she opened here six years ago. If it passes 200, they close the cafe. She’s had to shut five times in recent weeks because of the smoke that has stubbornly settled over the city.

“I always check in with my staff to make sure they feel good about coming in. If they say they don’t, we won’t open,” Depakakibo said from her home in Oakland, where she and her wife had the windows closed and two air filters running to protect their newborn baby.

As record-setting wildfires continue to burn up and down the West Coast, the numbers are still hard to comprehend. More than 5 million acres burned. At least 33 people dead. One month of destruction.

Stemming from climate change and land management practices, the fires are also having a massive impact on people far from any actual flames. Massive plumes of smoke have converged and covered almost the entire western edge of the United States. It has drifted into the neighboring states of Nevada and Arizona, lowering air quality in some parts. And smoke has even blotted out the sun thousands of miles away in D.C.

The haze along the West Coast has created the most polluted air in the world over the past week, forcing millions of residents indoors. The Bay Area has had a record run of bad air days, with residents being advised to avoid generating additional pollution for nearly a month. Air filters and purifiers have largely been sold out, and some people are buying personal air-quality devices to use in their homes. Some have put towels around their door frames and windows. Going outdoors is dangerous for even healthy lungs, and exercising has largely been out of the question.

Even if residents follow all precautions — a task made all the more difficult by coronavirus-related limitations on indoor activities — the smoke is still creating short- and long-term health risks for everyone exposed, health experts say.

The particles from wildfires are dangerously small, less than a micron wide, or 10 to 30 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Their size lets them slip past the body’s usual defenses and lodge deep inside the lungs, passing into the bloodstream and reaching the heart and the brain. The fires aren’t just burning trees but are also destroying houses, power lines and other infrastructure. The smoke is a complex mixture of volatile organic chemicals, ozone, nitrogen oxides and trace minerals, but it is the particulates less than 2.5 microns in size that worry experts the most.

Exposure can lead to immediate problems such as headaches, coughing and wheezing, and a person can become short of breath and experience a racing heartbeat. The dense smoke is a bigger danger for anyone with a respiratory ailment such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or asthma, and long-term exposure can contribute to heart attacks, strokes and, possibly, depression and anxiety, said Michael Jerrett, a professor at the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles.

“At these levels, even healthy people will start feeling symptoms,” said Gopal Allada, an associate professor of medicine focusing on pulmonary and critical care at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine in Portland.

The air in Portland was again the worst in the world on Wednesday, according to IQAir, which tracks air pollution levels globally. The EPA reported an AQI of 314 in the city as the Riverside Fire burned more than 135,000 acres in Oregon’s Clackamas County, roughly 50 miles away. Patients complaining of respiratory issues came into emergency rooms in the Portland area and sought help where they could find it.

On Monday, near downtown Portland, an aid group set up tents in the parking lot of the Lloyd Center mall. They handed out inhalers and masks. Medics treated irritated eyes.

One man showed up struggling to speak, his voice hoarse and his lips dusky. He told a medic, Tyler Cox, that he had COPD. Homeless, he had lost access to his nebulizer, a tool used for administering asthma medication.

Cox, an intensive care unit nurse volunteering in his free time, said he worried the temporary treatment might not be enough. “He could die if he’s in a place where he can’t get treatment,” Cox said in a voice made raspy by days of smoke exposure in the parking lot.

Victoria Olsen, another volunteer, said some people living on the streets have been tear-gassed by police in recent weeks amid the ongoing racial justice protests in the city.

“We have covid, we have the gas and then we have the smoke,” Olsen said.

Residents on the West Coast have for years dealt with the new realities of wildfire season, which tends to intensify in the fall when winds are high, the landscape is at its driest and before seasonal rains have begun. In November 2018, smoke from the deadly Camp Fire flowed into the Bay Area, causing people to stock up on N95 masks and air purifiers. Last year, the Kincade Fire in Sonoma County, just north of the Bay Area, triggered the same behavior.

It has become an annual event for residents in California, Oregon and Washington state: a week or two of smoke associated with a raging fire. Many already have some supplies and know what to do from past years.

This year is more difficult in many ways. Fire season came earlier than usual after an unusual lightning storm sparked many of the fires in California in mid-August. The blazes are also more widespread. At least 25 fires are burning in California and 29 in Oregon, according to officials. The pandemic has added complications, with breathable indoor spaces like offices, malls or movie theaters still largely off-limits.

And the smoke is lingering longer than usual — with more than a month of wildfire season to go.

Eight and a half months pregnant, Stephanie Sundstrom spends much of her time checking the EPA’s site and figuring out the best way to breathe clean air. To try to slow the toxic smoke leaking into her 110-year-old Portland house, she used duct tape to seal up a drafty back door. Aside from attending medical appointments, she tries to stay closed up in her bedroom, where a homemade air filter runs around-the-clock.

“I really want this to clear up before she gets here, because nobody wants their baby born in a smoky apocalypse,” said Sundstrom, 29, who works in marketing at Hewlett-Packard. “It just feels so unescapable; there’s nothing you can do. You can try to stay in your house, but everything just smells smoky.”

Like Sundstrom, many residents here monitor the air quality as they once did the weather. When deciding whether to go outside, they look up pollution levels for the locations around them on sites and apps like PurpleAir, AirVisual and AirNow. The maps show color-coded air-quality levels, pulled from government or low-cost sensors, typically ranging from “good” green to “hazardous” maroon.

PurpleAir is a Utah-based company that uses data from low-cost sensors it sells to map out air quality, and shares the data with other companies to map. The company has experienced a 1,000 percent increase in visitors to its website since the fires began, according to founder and CEO Adrian Dybwad, and has had a surge in orders for the air-quality sensors it sells. Air-quality apps have topped the download charts for weather over the past week, while traditional weather forecasts have added AQI numbers alongside temperature and humidity.

Read the rest of the article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/16/smoke-air-west/

By Heather Kelly and Samantha Schmidt

Originally published September 16, 2020

The New York Times interviewed COEH faculty Dr. Yifang Zhu about America’s wildfire air quality.

During a short walk in her Los Angeles neighborhood a few days ago, my colleague Jill Cowan could smell and feel the smoke that had entered her throat. In Estacada, Ore., southeast of Portland, Lisa Jones told The Washington Post that breathing the air felt “like sticking yourself in a little room with 12 people all around you, smoking cigarettes.” A friend of hers, Deborah Stratton, added, “It burns your chest.”

The worst effects of the wildfires are the direct ones: the deaths, the loss of homes and the destruction of natural habitat. But the secondary pollution effects — from the smoke that is clogging the air — are not minor.

The world’s most polluted cities are typically in Asia, like Delhi, Beijing, Lahore and Dhaka. Over the last few days, though, Portland, Ore., has had significantly worse air quality than any other city in the world. The air in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle hasn’t been quite so bad, but it has still been worse than in virtually any place outside the U.S.

Long-term exposure to the tiny particles in polluted air increases the risk of asthma, lung disorders, heart attacks and strokes. But even short-term exposure can lead to more respiratory problems, as Yifang Zhu, a professor at the U.C.L.A. Fielding School of Public Health, told my colleague Sanam Yar. And this year’s wildfires — some of which have already been going for about a month — may have weeks to burn. California’s wildfire season still has four months left.

“Two months of this kind of air quality is really going to impact people,” Pawan Gupta, a research scientist at the NASA’s Universities Space Research Association, said.

By David Leonhardt

Originally published September 15, 2020 at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/briefing/wildfires-venus-hurricane-sa…

The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health (FSPH) has joined the Planetary Health Alliance (PHA), a consortium of more than 200 universities, research institutes, and government agencies committed to understanding and addressing global environmental change and its health impacts.

“Joining the PHA will give FSPH new opportunities to engage in the emerging field of planetary health, which addresses the complex and interconnected health and environmental issues the world faces today,” said Yifang Zhu, Fielding School of Public Health professor of environmental health sciences and associate dean for academic programs. “Being part of the PHA community will provide FSPH students and faculty with research and networking opportunities with other universities around the world.”

Launched with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation in 2016, the Planetary Health Alliance focuses on advancing research focused on planetary health, a field of science that is focused on characterizing the human health impacts of human-caused disruptions of Earth’s natural systems.

The PHA, which also seeks to advance education and policy, includes institutions from more than 40 countries and is supported by a secretariat based at Harvard and a steering committee of international experts. Member institutions include the American Public Health Association, the California Academy of Sciences, and the University of California Global Health Institute, among others.

At the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, the PHA’s liaison will be Miriam Marlier, assistant professor of environmental health sciences, who previously collaborated with other PHA members when she was at Columbia University in New York. Marlier, whose research focuses on wildfires and the use of remote sensing to improve disaster response in the United States, India, and Indonesia, came to UCLA FSPH this year from the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where she studied similar questions.

“The Planetary Health Alliance does fantastic work and the partnership is a great fit for our school—PHA brings together people in academics as well as practitioners,” said Marlier, a UCLA alumnus who earned her doctorate at Columbia. “It’s unique and really helpful to have that sort of opportunity where you’re connecting people who are doing basic research with people who are more tied to the policy and implementation side.”

The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, founded in 1961, is dedicated to enhancing the public’s health by conducting innovative research, training future leaders and health professionals from diverse backgrounds, translating research into policy and practice, and serving our local communities and the communities of the nation and the world. The school has 690 students from 25 nations engaged in carrying out the vision of building healthy futures in greater Los Angeles, California, the nation and the world.

Originally published September 4, 2020 at https://www.newswise.com/articles/ucla-fielding-school-of-public-health-…

UCLA announced Wednesday it has created the UCLA Center for Healthy Climate Solutions under the aegis of its Fielding School of Public Health to combat “the most significant public health disaster we face.”

“Los Angeles is a city that tackles our toughest challenges by tapping into the innovation and creativity in our own backyard, and this UCLA center will help us build a safer, cleaner and more equitable city and world,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is chair of C40 Cities, a global organization of almost 100 cities committed to action against climate change.

UCLA C-Solutions, as the center will be known, will collaborate with public officials and community partners, including the mayor’s office, to advance research-based strategies for strengthening communities’ ability to adapt to climate change’s harmful health effects and slowing its impact.

“Climate change is the most significant public health disaster we face, with effects that are already being felt and will only become more severe if we don’t take bold and immediate actions,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, the co-director of C-Solutions and a UCLA distinguished professor-in-residence of public health and medicine. “If we don*t solve the climate issue, we won’t have a habitable planet. End of story.”

Fielding was Los Angeles County’s public health director and health officer for 16 years and recently co-chaired Healthy People 2030, which set national health objectives for the next decade. He said climate change should no longer be viewed solely as a future problem, but as a current crisis.

In major cities in the U.S. and around the world, more frequent heat waves are causing increased numbers of illnesses and deaths. Hotter and drier conditions are resulting in longer, more intense wildfire seasons. Warmer ocean temperatures have increased the intensity of hurricanes, cyclones, and tropical storms, and the wide-ranging effects range from flooding to a higher incidence of anxiety and depression.

While climate change ultimately affects everyone, the health risks are disproportionately felt among low-income families, people of color, outdoor workers and those with chronic health conditions, Fielding said. The center will prioritize research, policy recommendations and advocacy efforts that could benefit those vulnerable groups.

“We know from research that there are many ways to mitigate or adapt to climate change that come with public health co-benefits; for example, promoting active travel with better infrastructure for walking and biking reduces greenhouse gas emissions and also increases beneficial physical activity in the population,” said C-Solutions co-director Michael Jerrett, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Fielding School.

“Studies have found that air pollution is associated with 8 million deaths a year worldwide from heart conditions, strokes, lung cancer and other health issues, and estimates indicate that moving to a more sustainable energy system to reduce climate change would save about 1 million lives a year …”

C-Solutions’ work is already underway. The center, which includes UCLA faculty experts as well as students training to serve as the next generation of climate health leaders, prioritizes research, innovation and the practical application of solutions. For example, research being conducted by Jerrett addresses the health benefits of measures to prevent wildfires and reduce exposure to related air pollution.

And to ensure that solutions will have lasting positive impact, the center is working with community organizations. An effort underway with the Prevention Institute is aimed at understanding the life expectancy benefits from increasing green space and parks, which also help people adapt to the warming climate by cooling cities.

The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, founded in 1961, has 690 students from 25 nations engaged in “building healthy futures in greater Los Angeles, California, the nation and the world,” according to a UCLA statement.

Originally published September 2, 2020 at https://mynewsla.com/education/2020/09/02/ucla-announces-creation-of-cen…

California companies and their employees have clashed throughout the pandemic over whether employers should tell workers if they have potentially been exposed to the coronavirus on the job. Now a bill passed by the Legislature and headed to the governor’s desk, AB685, seeks to clarify what companies must tell employees and state officials about such risks.

Workers’ advocates say the legislation is key to shoring up workplace safety and retaliation protections for employees when it comes to reporting a case of the coronavirus. But business groups are worried the bill is still too vague on what it requires of companies and amounts to a public shaming when an outbreak is associated with a company.

The bill is awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature after the Assembly included some amendments from the Senate.

AB685 would require employers to give written notice and instructions to workers who may have been exposed to the coronavirus at work. It also requires that businesses notify health authorities if infections become widespread, information that the California Department of Public Health can then make public.

The bill also creates anti-retaliation protections for employees who report infections, to encourage them to come forward.

Companies are already required to disclose cases of the virus to local health departments, but that information is not public. Companies are also required to report workplace-related injuries to state regulator Cal/OSHA, but there has been some disagreement on whether that includes cases of the coronavirus.

“The bill makes mandatory what many employers already are doing and what health authorities have been recommending that they do, which is notify employees when they’ve possibly been exposed and do contact tracing,” said Charles Thompson, a lawyer at the San Francisco office of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart.

How broadly a company notifies workers about a workplace infection has largely been up to employers and local health departments during the pandemic, however.

In the Bay Area, cases of the coronavirus at electric-car maker Tesla’s Fremont plant have led some workers to speak out about what they feel is a lack of transparency around potential infections from co-workers. Tesla conducts rigorous contact tracing but limits notifications to workers with close contact to an infected individual.

Business critics of the bill including the Western Growers, an Irvine association representing farmers in Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico, have questioned what “potential” exposure means and said that it is not clear what employers have to tell their workers when a case is identified.

“We are still very much opposed to AB685 primarily because we’re very unclear as to what this measure is going to do to make the workplace more safe,” said Matthew Allen, the group’s vice president of state government affairs.

Allen said that a host of amendments he hoped to see added to the bill had been left out but that a clearer definition of what constitutes a work site subject to the bill, particularly in agricultural settings where fields and indoor sites are involved, was added.

Despite the reputational risk to businesses of a disclosed infection, increased transparency about the virus in the workplace will help workers protect themselves, said Linda Delp, a UCLA professor and director of the school’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program.

“I can’t tell you how many calls and questions we’ve gotten at (the program) about ‘My employer is not being up-front with me about what is happening,’” Delp said. “As much clarity as possible will help workers to feel like they are at least being told up front what’s happening in the workplace,” she added.

Delp said underreporting and the sheer number of virus cases make it almost impossible for local and state authorities to track and trace them in the workplace without the help of employers.

“I don’t see an alternative,” Delp said.

It is not clear if Gov. Newsom will sign the bill, but Allen of the Western Growers said he expects it will become law.

 

By Chase DiFeliciantonio

Chase DiFeliciantonio is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: chase.difeliciantonio@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChaseDiFelice

Originally published September 1, 2020 at https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/California-bill-requiring-c…

Photo by David Fuller

Pregnant women exposed to soot from jet engines were at increased risk of giving birth prematurely.

Living near an airport may increase the risk for preterm birth, a new study has found.

Air pollution is usually measured in volumes of small particles of soot as small as 2.5 micrometers in diameter. But these researchers tracked ultrafine particles, bits of soot as small as 0.1 micrometers, in the exhaust from jet engines. These particles easily enter the lungs and pass into the bloodstream.

Researchers used Environmental Protection Agency data to calculate levels of ultrafine particles within 15 kilometers of Los Angeles International Airport, and then used birth records to track 174,186 births from 2008 through 2016 in the same geographical area.

Compared with women in the lowest one-quarter for exposure to ultrafine particles, those in the highest one-quarter were 14 percent more likely to give birth prematurely.

The study, in Environmental Health Perspectives, controlled for a number of factors that affect the risk for preterm birth, including airport noise levels and pollution caused by road traffic. Still, there are many risks they could not control for, and this observational study does not prove cause and effect.

The lead author, Beate Ritz, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, alluded to these additional risks in people who live near airports. “These are often immigrants, minorities, people of low socioeconomic status living in housing that does not protect them from air pollution,” she said. “Ultrafine particles may be the last straw for these pregnancies.”

By Nicholas Bakalar

Originally published August 11, 2020 at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/well/family/living-near-an-airport-may-raise-risks-of-preterm-birth.html

On the anniversary of the Aug. 6 2012 Chevron Richmond fire that nearly killed 19 workers and sent 15,000 in search of medical care, UCLA Labor Occupational Safety and Health (LOSH) Program & United Steelworkers Local 675 released new videos about California’s groundbreaking PSM regulation to protect refinery workers and communities.
 
The 4-part video series can be viewed on LOSH’s website: losh.ucla.edu/psm

 

SAFER REFINERIES, SAFER COMMUNITIES

California’s 2017 Process Safety Management (PSM) regulation represents the most important advancement for industrial safety in America since 1992, when federal OSHA issued the first PSM regulation in the wake of the Union Carbide chemical disaster in Bhopal India that killed as many as 15,000 people.

This groundbreaking regulation was the result of labor, community and environmental justice organizing for stronger protections from refinery hazards after the 2012 Chevron Richmond fire that nearly killed 19 workers and sent an estimated 15,000 community members to seek health care.

The PSM regulation creates a framework for process safety in California’s refineries long recognized as essential to refinery safety.  Key elements include rights for workers, hierarchy of controls, inherent safety measures, damage mechanism reviews, human factors, safety culture and more.  The right for workers to have a voice is the foundation of this regulation.

It is up to us to make sure the regulation is implemented and enforced  – for safer refineries and safer communities.  To that end, UCLA LOSH collaborated with the United Steelworkers (USW) to create four short videos that highlight the history and key elements of the regulation. They are designed for outreach and education with workers, community members, labor and environmental justice organizations.

Contact them at loshinfo@ucla.edu about worker training and click below to see the videos in the series:

• o PSM: The Fight for Workers’ Lives
• o What is PSM?
• o PSM: Employee Participation and Stop Work Authority
• o PSM: Management of Change (MOC) and Management of Organizational Change (MOOC)

A research team led by UCLA Fielding School of Public Health faculty has been awarded a contract to study connections between air pollution and the COVID-19 pandemic, officials said.

“We’re really interested in seeing whether long term exposure to air pollution makes someone more likely to have a worse prognosis after they do get COVID-19,” said Michael Jerrett, a UCLA Fielding School of Public Health professor of environmental health sciences who serves as the principal investigator of the team. The researchers include scientists and physicians from UCLA, the University of California, Davis; the University of California, Berkeley; and Kaiser Permanente Southern California.

The partnership with Kaiser will provide the researchers with patient information from a large cross-section of southern California’s population, from San Diego to Bakersfield. Jerrett said the size of that data pool and the quality of the health data is critical to understanding the impact that living in an area with bad air quality may have on whether a COVID-19 patient survives the disease.

“Kaiser has a population base of 4.5 million patients, and we can follow them from diagnosis through therapy to – potentially, and tragically – death,” said Jerrett, who has led similar research projects on air pollution and mortality in California and the U.S.

“We’re hypothesizing that people who live in areas with worse air quality in southern California are more likely to experience severe illness than people who live in areas with cleaner air,” Jerrett said. “Our advanced exposure modeling also allows us to hone in on the specific types of air pollution that could make people more likely to be admitted to be admitted to intensive care, or to die.”

The project is funded by the California Air Resources Board, whose board voted unanimously in July to allot more than $600,000 to the research effort. The work will analyze information from Kaiser Permanente about patient outcomes from Los Angeles, Kern, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Ventura counties. The information will also enable the investigators to examine whether exposure gradients along socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity are partly responsible for a worse prognosis of some patient groups, as well as examining the impacts of preexisting conditions.

Original post https://alertarticles.info

The LA Times interviewed Linda Delp, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health adjunct associate professor of environmental health sciences and director of the UCLA-Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program, about how consumers can act if they see a business ignoring pandemic response guidelines. 

Good morning. I’m Taylor Avery, here with the L.A. Times Business section’s weekly newsletter. As California keeps breaking COVID-19 records — and not in the good way — the businesses allowed to stay open are largely required to follow rules to help slow the coronavirus’ spread.

But not all businesses are complying, which can have fatal consequences for their workers and customers.

Customers and bystanders aren’t required to intervene if they see these rules being broken, but since several people have written to The Times to ask what actions they can take, let’s look at the options.

You could start with a relatively low-key move: Ask the manager whether the business is aware of the rules and encourage following them. It might be an honest mistake, since rules vary by jurisdiction and industry — there are statewide guidelines as well as orders and guidance by local governments and health officials — and they have been changing over the course of the pandemic. (Before leveling accusations, make sure you’re up to date on the rules too.)

If the business continues its risky behavior, you can choose to get officials involved. Document the hazard you see. Note the date, time and location, and put together a detailed explanation and/or take photos.

If the business is in the city of Los Angeles, you can report it through the city’s online complaint form.

If the business is in L.A. County, you can report it through the online Environmental Health Online Complaint System. Or you could call (888) 700-9995 or email ehmail@ph.lacounty.gov.

Beginning late this month, businesses that break coronavirus safety rules will be subject to fines from the L.A. County Department of Public Health. Fines are set at $100 for the first offense and $500 for additional offenses, with a 30-day permit suspension after multiple incidents.

However, the county Department of Public Health receives a vast number of complaints about businesses: some 2,000 to 3,000 per week. If you want to escalate the matter further, said Linda Delp, director of UCLA’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program, you could do the following:

— Contact your local elected officials. In Los Angeles, that could include the City Council and county Board of Supervisors members who represent your area. You also have the option of contacting your state senator and Assembly member, U.S. House representative or U.S. senators.

— Turn to your social media channel of choice. That can put you in touch with others who have had similar experiences with the business and could put pressure on it to comply with safety protocols.

— Reach out to organizations you belong to, such as neighborhood groups, faith communities or your employer. They may be able to help you lobby the business to follow safety rules. Methods can include the above — contacting the business directly, filing reports and reaching out to elected officials — and can escalate to staging a boycott and spreading the world (with proper social distancing).

To see the full article, visit https://www.latimes.com/business/newsletter/2020-08-04/covid-19-rules-reporting-businesses-business

Photo thumbnail from https://www.flickr.com/photos/iloasiapacific/

A study from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health has found that pregnant women exposed to high levels of ultrafine particles from jet airplane exhaust are 14% more likely to have a preterm birth than those exposed to lower levels.

The researchers examined exposure among women living near Los Angeles International Airport, in an area that includes neighborhoods in Los Angeles, El Segundo, Hawthorne, Inglewood and several other communities inland from the airport.

“The data suggest that airplane pollution contributes to preterm births above and beyond the main source of air pollution in this area, which is traffic,” said Dr. Beate Ritz, a professor in the departments of epidemiology and environmental health sciences at the Fielding School.

Preterm birth is associated with complications such as immature lungs, difficulty regulating body temperature, poor feeding and slow weight gain.

The research team, co-led by Ritz and Scott Fruin of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, examined records for all births—a total of 174,186 —between 2008 and 2016 to mothers living within nine miles (15 km) of LAX. They divided the overall area into four sections based on the amount of ultrafine particle, or UFP, pollution from jet exhaust, with the section nearest the airport experiencing the highest exposure.

After adjusting for traffic-related air pollution and other variables that may affect the risk of preterm birth, including airport-related noise and the mother’s age, education level and race, they found that expectant mothers in the quarter with the highest average ultrafine particle exposure had 14% higher odds of a preterm birth than mothers in the quarter with the lowest exposure.

“Nearly 2 million people live within a 10-mile radius of LAX, many of whom are exposed to elevated levels of aircraft-origin UFPs,” said Sam Wing, a scholar at the Fielding School who also worked on the study.

The research is summarized in an article published July 22 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives and is based on a lengthy study from the spring 2020 edition of the journal. Other authors include Timothy Larson and Sarunporn Boonyarattaphan of the University of Washington and Neelakshi Hudda of Tufts University.

By Brad Smith

Originally published at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-jet-aircraft-exhaust-linked-preterm.html