Clean air called achievable

Controlling air pollution is an opportunity to prevent disease. Even "relatively modest" amounts of air pollution adversely impact health. And Americans have been making progress in cleaning up air, despite the fact that more cars are on the road burning fuels.

That's the good news. The bad news is that even after all the efforts and improvements, health still suffers, according to an overview of what studies have shown about pollution and its negative effects on not only lung but heart health, written by Brigham Young University professor and epidemiologist C. Arden Pope. The editorial accompanies the latest national research on the subject, published in the New England Journal of Medicine today.

Pope has had a number of major studies on the topic of pollution and health published in various prestigious journals, so he was invited to write the editorial putting the newest research in context.

He's learned that clean air is an elusive, but achievable goal.

"Not perfectly clean; there are all sorts of pollutions like volcanoes, windblown dust, wildfires. But it is realistic to think we can dramatically reduce the amount of pollutants that come from burning of fossil fuel," Pope told the Deseret Morning News. "I think there will come a time when we think of internal combustion engine as being as archaic as a mule. But that's a long ways off."

What we can do in the short term, he said, is become more efficient in our energy use and, when we have to burn fossil fuels like coal and gasoline, learn how to burn it even cleaner.

That is the area where we've made the most progress, he noted.

History indicates change may be on the way.

"In the history of energy consumption, energy of one kind comes in and dominates. As it becomes increasingly scarce and the price goes up (as it is now), you see another come on board. What we're seeing right now is nonfossil fuel energy is growing. I suspect in a few generations, our energy consumption will be very different than today, but it's very hard to predict."

The editorial traces the first health concerns about pollution to specific episodes: 1930 in Belgium, Pennsylvania in 1948 and London in 1952, prompting early public-policy efforts to improve air quality to "avert such 'killer' episodes of air pollution."