Grit in O.C. Air Blamed in 1,000 Deaths Yearly

More than 1,000 Orange County residents and 64,000 people in major American cities may be dying annually from lung or heart problems aggravated by breathing the gritty air pollution known as particulates, according to a study released Wednesday by a national environmental group.

The microscopic particles are considered by health experts to be the deadliest air pollutant, yet this is the first time that anyone has tried to quantify the threat nationally and from city to city.

In 239 U.S. metropolitan areas, the Natural Resources Defense Council says cardiopulmonary deaths from particulates exceed the toll from auto accidents, as well as from AIDS and breast cancer combined. The group used Harvard and American Cancer Society research and Environmental Protection Agency pollution data to make its estimate.

The tiny pieces of pollution, spewed from diesel trucks, cars, dusty roads, power plants and an array of other sources, are small enough to lodge in lungs and aggravate respiratory and heart disease. They also are responsible for the dirty, opaque haze that often blankets Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Scientists unassociated with the group’s project commended the death calculations as reasonable, even conservative, based on their own research.

“They used assumptions that would not give them extreme highs. In fact, they used ones that would maybe bias it a little downward,” said C. Arden Pope, a Brigham Young University epidemiologist who co-authored the Harvard studies and others that found particulate pollution increases premature deaths. “These numbers seem to be a fairly reasonable, literal interpretation of the science as it exists today.”

In recent research led by the Harvard School of Public Health, Pope and other scientists concluded after tracking the health of thousands of people in six cities that particulates shorten lives by one to three years. The biggest risk is faced by the elderly and people afflicted with asthma, angina, pneumonia or other lung and heart ailments.

Six California urban areas topped the nation in the death rate per capita blamed on particulates in the study released Wednesday. The worst was the Visalia area and the Riverside-San Bernardino region, which have the nation’s most severe concentrations of the pollution, trailed closely by Bakersfield, Fresno, Stockton and the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area.

And in total numbers of deaths linked to particulates, the Los Angeles-Long Beach area led the nation with nearly 6,000 per year, followed by New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. The Anaheim-Santa Ana area ranked 12th worst.

Taking the most conservative fatality rate found in the Harvard-American Cancer Society study, the environmental group blamed the pollutant for 6.5% of the 980,000 annual deaths from pulmonary and heart ailments in the studied cities. The percentage varied from city to city based on their air quality. Los Angeles was assigned a much higher rate--17% of cardiopulmonary deaths linked to the pollution.

The Anaheim-Santa Ana area had 1,053 annual deaths from heart and lung disease attributed to particulates, about 14% of the total number of such deaths each year.

Pope called the death toll estimates “quite large” compared to other health threats. The mortality estimated from particulates in greater Los Angeles is four times the number who died from auto accidents. Nationally, about 54,000 people die annually in traffic wrecks.

“Over 64,000 [annual deaths] for these metropolitan areas--that is really quite substantial, especially for something as nonvoluntary as [breathing] air pollution,” Pope said.

The study comes as the Clinton administration is debating how to revise the EPA’s nine-year-old health standard for particulates, and as the Los Angeles region’s air board contemplates new efforts for cleaning up the pollution.

Several recent scientific studies, especially the Harvard work, have indicated that the EPA’s current standard is not stringent enough to safeguard public health. The EPA faces a court order to revise it by January.

“Clearly, current health standards are not protecting thousands of people from the deadly consequences of particulate air pollution,” said Deborah Sheiman Shprentz, author of the Natural Resources Defense Council report. “The single most important public health decision facing EPA this year is whether to establish new air quality standards for fine particles.”

Mary Nichols, assistant administrator of the EPA, said the agency later this year will propose new limits that will probably focus on ultra-fine particles. Particles smaller than 2.5 microns, a fraction of the diameter of a human hair, are the most hazardous and come mostly from cars and trucks and other equipment burning fossil fuels.

The environmental group said 5,000 to 38,000 deaths per year could be prevented by the changes the EPA is considering, depending on how tough a standard the agency chooses. The issue is controversial because of the economic impact of tough cleanup measures, especially for diesel trucks, cars, coal-burning power plants and factories.

Particulate pollution in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties has remained about the same or declined slightly in the past 10 years, despite efforts to clean up the air, according to data from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

Orange County has three AQMD stations for monitoring particulates. The highest amounts were found in Anaheim, but the other two, El Toro and Newport Beach, also were high. The level found in Anaheim is among the top 50 concentrations in the country.

This summer, the AQMD is expected to unveil a decade-long strategy for reducing the particles in the four-county region to achieve the health standard. It will trigger a new emphasis in California pollution control that moves beyond the traditional attack on ozone, the main ingredient of smog.

Techniques used by the environmental group were reviewed by several scientists, including Harvard researcher Joel Schwartz and Bailus Walker, a Howard University professor of environmental medicine.

Walker said NRDC “chose the best available scientific methods. . . . Here there is little about which to quibble.”

Health experts are puzzled as to why death rates apparently go up with airborne levels of the smallest particulates. They suspect it adds an additional stress to lungs and hearts that are already compromised. However, the culprit might not be the particles themselves, but something they carry deep into the lungs, such as toxic chemicals.

Still, Pope and Harvard epidemiologist D. W. Dockery reported in 1994 that there is little doubt that the particles do increase premature deaths in a substantial amount.

“Air pollution isn’t as bad as cigarette smoking, but it’s the same kind of thing,” Pope said. “It’s simply not good for your lungs to breathe this stuff and over long enough periods of time, for many people, it has substantial consequences, and that’s what this study suggests.”