Air Pollution’s Comeback is Double Trouble, Especially for Children
On the rise again, bad air is deadlier and more debilitating than we thought. And that’s just the half of it.
When Dr. Matthew Fuller, an assistant professor of surgery at University of Utah Health, noticed “a pattern in the relation to air quality and pregnancy loss” among women living on the Wasatch Front, a region known for atrocious smog days, he teamed up with research analyst Claire Leiser to dig into data on more than 1,300 women who had come into the emergency department after a miscarriage. Their research, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, found that women had at 16% higher risk of miscarriage following short-term exposure to elevated levels of air pollution. It is one of many studies revealing that the effects of air pollution start in the womb, changing the biology of the unborn and dogging many of them through childhood, if they make it there.
Global warming gets all the attention, but one of the primary causes of climate change — burning fossil fuels — pollutes the air we breathe, too. Yet like a foul-smelling zombie, pollution is creeping back in the United States, just as the federal government has rolled back more than a dozen clean-air policies, some of which were enacted in recent decades and others…
