Discounting pollution study does disservice to participants

ISteve Rissing

n 1976, the good people of Steubenville and five other American towns agreed to participate in a study of the possible health effects of air pollution.

One of the study’s biologists said of the participants: “It has always amazed me how interested and cooperative people were. We would go into people’s homes and set up equipment; we would have all kinds of boxes and noisy pumps, and they were still very happy to participate.”

Thus began the Harvard Six Cities Study. Its results have advised federal airquality standards for the past quarter-century.

The New England Journal of Medicine published a landmark study of the participants in 1993. It found “statistically significant and robust associations between air pollution and mortality.” Further, “mortality was most strongly associated with air pollution with fine particulates.”

Fine particulates are

2.5 micrometers or less in diameter. You could line up three fine particles across the mid-line of a red blood cell. The smallest fine particles from air pollution cross cell membranes. They move from lung air sacs into organs such as the heart via the bloodstream.

Burning fossil fuels — especially coal, diesel fuel and gasoline — generates these fine particulates.

Steubenville, in Jefferson County in eastern Ohio, had the highest levels of air pollution of the six cities in the Harvard study. Further, “mortality (from air pollution) was highest in Steubenville.” Indeed, the mortality rate among study participants there was 51 percent higher than in Portage, Wisconsin, the city with the lowest air-pollution levels in the study.

Not surprisingly, Steubenville’s fine-particle air pollution concentrations were 170 percent higher than Portage’s.

The researchers did not pay the 8,111 participants who opened their homes and health records to them. But, the researchers assured their subjects confidentiality about the health information they shared.

Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt now proposes to disqualify findings of the Six Cities and similar studies when setting new air-pollution standards. Pruitt demands that the EPA base policies only on studies that reveal their “raw data,” which would have to include identity of research participants. Researchers promised study participants they would never reveal that information.

Because of its pivotal role in setting air-quality standards, the Six Cities Study data have undergone repeated and extensive audit, review and re-analysis. The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology subpoenaed the Six Cities raw data in 2013. These reviews consistently support the original conclusions: Air pollution from burning fossil fuels makes people sick.

As the authors of a 1995 peer-reviewed paper about the Harvard study argued: “When a substantial body of epidemiologic evidence indicates that a material to which people are commonly exposed may be having serious adverse health effects, the burden of proof may be deemed to have shifted from those who draw a causal inference, to those who maintain no causal inference is possible.”

Those who maintain no causal inference between fossil fuels they sell and serious adverse health impacts can’t do that. So, they resort to semantic tricks. They demand “raw data,” including participants’ identities. This lets them ignore 50 years of careful science on adverse health impacts of air pollution.

That must leave the good people in Steubenville feeling pretty raw.