What’s Up Doc? Pollution and health

Question: How serious are the medical consequences of pollution?

Answer: Everyone relies on clean air, clean water and a stable climate to keep them healthy, prevent illnesses and to prevent flareups of certain chronic diseases. When these shared resources are polluted, the medical consequences can be severe, and even fatal.

A couple of years ago, I addressed some of the effects of climate change causing an increased incidence of forest fires, due to droughts, blizzards, tornados, flooding, hurricanes, tsunamis, rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, etc. The negative health effects from these include an increase in respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, increases in "vector borne" -- transmitted by insects -- infectious diseases, negative impacts to our food supply and many other consequences. According to World Health Organization estimates for 2030 and beyond, climate change itself will kill a quarter of a million people or more every year, with this number increasing over time as the impact of climate change becomes more and more pronounced.

But the medical ramifications from pollution extend well beyond climate change. Pollution directly impacts the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink, and these have profound and immediate medical consequences. Pollution is already directly contributing to over 8 million deaths worldwide every year, one in every seven deaths.

Not surprisingly, poor quality air to breath increases respiratory illnesses -- asthma, lung cancer, COPD, others -- cardiovascular illnesses -- heart attacks, strokes, others -- as well as many other conditions -- it is at least a contributing factor to the development of many cancers, and exacerbates many chronic medical conditions. Air pollution kills over 6 million people worldwide every year, including over half a million kids.

Poor quality drinking water increases the risk of many waterborne infectious diseases, as well as diseases due to toxic exposure -- remember the toxic industrial waste pollution in Love Canal which was a major trigger of the Superfund site cleanup legislation, as well as the more recent lead poisoning issues in Flint, Michigan, amongst many other examples. Water pollution kills up to 2 million people every year and sickens many, many more.

Workplace exposure to pollutants is of particular concern to many hard-working Americans. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are 3 million American workers injured and over 5,000 killed because of occupational exposure to toxins in the workplace every year, and this does not include the potential cancers and other chronic conditions to which these toxins may contribute.

Increasing pollution is yet another issue where those governing us are failing us, making short-sighted decisions now, too often driven by short term business profits, at the expense of our future and the future of generations to come. For example, the present administration has significantly cut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, creating the biggest backlog of unfunded cleanup projects in decades -- there are now 34 unfunded Superfund projects, up from 12 in 2016. Since the EPA is responsible for monitoring and regulating the quality of our drinking water -- to prevent domestic sewage, pesticides, fertilizers and many other pollutants from entering our community water supply -- the budget cuts today may have huge implications over the coming years. We need to let the people representing us in government know that selling out the future quality of our air and water -- as well as the climate of our planet as a whole -- to greedy businesses is not acceptable.

Jeff Hersh, Ph.D., M.D., can be reached at DrHersh@juno.com.

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