An article in the Huffington Post, written by Seth Borenstein, discusses a new study that suggests 3.3 million people a year are being killed by air pollution and that the death total could double by 2050. The journal article published in Nature Letters that Borenstein is referring to titled, "The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale," was written on a study performed by J. Lelieveld at the Max Plank Insitute and in collaboration with The Cyprus Institute, Harvard School of Public Health and King Saud University.
In his article, Borenstein discusses some of the different important contributions to outdoor air pollution related deaths worldwide, highlighting agriculture, power plants and traffic emissions. Borenstein comments on how the agricultural death number (664,100 deaths worldwide) was surprising, both to him and Lelieveld. However Borenstein then continues on by explaining how ammonia form fertilizer and animal waste from farms can enter the atmosphere and react with nitrates and sulfates to produce smog.
Table 1 shows the current estimated death toll caused from outdoor air pollution and the projected 2050 estimates, showing the expected increases in the number of deaths (Lelieveld et al, 2015).
While Borenstein does a nice job of explaining the overall study, he does fail to mention that Lelieveld does admit that while biomass combustion and soil dust particles were not observed to influence mortality, there were few cities these particles were measured with any consistency. Also, using the atmospheric model ECHAM5/MESSy, the estimated deaths caused by outdoor air pollution was indeed 3.3 million, but Borenstein failed to report the confidence interval associated with this. The estimated was reported in the journal article as 3.3 million, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.61-4.81 million. When discussing human death toll, this seems to be an important component to include.
Overall, I found that Borenstein did manage to capture the main points of the journal article. He was able to keep the science behind the atmospheric chemistry in simplified terms. He even reported both positive and negative comments associated with the study, which is important when communicating science to the public.
Link to Huffington Post Article
Link to Air Pollution Study
I think the Huffington Post article did a good job summarizing the original journal article to an extent, however I think too much of an emphasis was placed on agricultural contributions. Borenstein clings to the agricultural impact from the beginning, claiming its contribution to air pollution related mortality to be a "surprise".
ReplyDeleteIn reading through the original article, it's evident that Borestein entirely overlooks the impact of differential toxicity on mortality statistics. Although it was not a focus of the study, it was still discussed throughout the entire original article. If carbaceous PM2.5 is five times more toxic than inorganic particles, as assumed by the journal article, there would be a significant change in the contributions to mortality for each anthropogenic source. For example, Europe was greatly influenced by agricultural sources in the equal toxicity data, but using differential toxicity data the sources with greater influence become transportation and residential uses.
Overall, I think this is an issue with the original article. The authors state that the evidence for differential toxicity is "far from conclusive". I question why they chose to include it in this article at all. It seems like it would be better suited as a separate article, perhaps with more conclusive research done. Had the article just focused on equal toxicity for all particulate matter, I think the Huffington Post article did a good job. However, since the original article did include a lot about differential toxicity, I think that Borenstein should have avoided placing such emphasis on agricultural pollution.
I think that Borenstein's discussion on agriculture's contribution to air pollution was important to the article. I have always thought that agriculture was the environmental-friendly alternative to many of our nation's and world's environmental concerns. Before reading this, I wasn't aware that the ammonia from fertilizer and animal waste contributed so significantly to air pollution. With air pollution being a significant cause of death, and agriculture being one of the contributors to that, I am glad that Borenstein informs the public that agriculture is not always the answer for less environmental health problems. Hopefully we can make more progress in research towards agricultural-friendly techniques.
DeleteI think you bring up a valid point, Ashley. Perhaps the reasoning behind Borenstein's focus on the agricultural mortality impact is that, as Jessica pointed out, agricultural is seen as an environmental-friendly process. Keep in mind that this is a news article. Their objective may indeed be to report important world events, but they also want to captivate an audience. The surprise factor of agriculture playing a role in mortality rates associated with air pollution is an excellent attention grabber.
DeleteI agree with Ryan that the Huntington Post article should have included the confidence interval. It has been a while since I took statistics, but I am pretty sure that means that there might be only 1.61 million premature deaths per year worldwide. That is still an extreme number, but nearly half of the reported value of 3.3 million.
ReplyDeleteExactly, Rebecca. Though this also means there could have been a lot more deaths associated with air pollution, the range is rather large not to include.
DeleteFollowing the train of thought on the first comment, I do think this is one of the least known sources of air pollution. Many of us don't give much thought to how fertilizers can get into the atmosphere as well as into the soil, or how animal waste gets disposed of. If it wasn't for some of my vegan friends, I wouldn't be aware of this (even though they sometimes blow it out of proportion to scare people into becoming vegetarians/vegans [extremists can be sensationalists]). Something that should also be noted is that on the Scientific Article, the author talks about other species that can affect human health such as ozone and desert dust, which are relevant as well and should have been included in the Huffington Post article.
ReplyDeleteConsidering that desert dust can affect a large amount of people because of various reasons, such as its lost range of transport and being one of the biggest sources of mineral dust in the atmosphere.
DeleteDefinitely a fair point! My thought on why this may of been left out other than that the article wanted to focus on the surprising agricultural mortality influence, is that the Lelieveld mentions their data on mineral dust was not necessarily reliable since they had only a few cities equipped to measure these particles.
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ReplyDeleteAnyone else surprised that the United States seems to have fewer deaths related to air pollution than Europe? Would this be relative to stricter EPA standards the United States holds? Or a greater population density in Europe causing greater exposure? -Garrett
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