It’s not just for animals. From The American Journal of Epidemiology comes a study on coal and oil power plant retirements by Joan A Casey, Deborah Karasek, Elizabeth L Ogburn, Dana E Goin, Kristina Dang, Paula A Braveman, and Rachel Morello-Frosch, and this is from the abstract:
We used California Department of Public Health birth records and Energy Information Administration data from 2001-2011 to evaluate the relationship between 8 coal and oil power plant retirements and nearby preterm births ( < 37 weeks gestational age). We conducted a difference-in-differences analysis using adjusted linear mixed models that included 57,005 births–6.5% of which were preterm–to compare the probability of preterm birth before and after power plant retirement among mothers residing within 0-5 km and 5-10 km of the 8 power plants. We found that power plant retirements were associated with a decrease in the proportion of preterm birth within 5 km (-0.019, 95% CI: -0.031, -0.008) and 5-10 km (-0.015, 95% CI: -0.024, -0.007) controlling for secular trends with mothers living 10-20 km away. For the 0-5 km area, this corresponds to a reduction in preterm birth from 7.0% to 5.1%. Subgroup analyses indicated a potentially larger association among non-Hispanic Black and Asian mothers compared to non-Hispanic White and Hispanic mothers and no differences in educational attainment. Future coal and oil power plant retirements may reduce preterm birth among nearby populations.
An immediate impact on the health of people surrounding these power plants is an important observation, and suggests that those living near these power plants bear a disproportionate share of the burden these power plants inflict on society. Not that, in the past, this was unjustifiable, for one could argue that power brought greater social goods. Today, though, with the development of cleaner power sources, defending oil and coal fired power plants has become inadvisable for those who wish to keep clean intellectual reputations.
In Inside Climate News, Sabrina Shankman comments on further problems:
In a separate article published last week in the American Heart Association’s journal Hypertension, [Noel Mueller, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University] examined what can happen when the pollution source is not eliminated.
In a study that looked at 1,293 mothers and their children in the Boston area, Mueller and his coauthors found that babies who were exposed to higher levels of particulate matter during the third trimester were significantly more likely to have high blood pressure in childhood.
Particulate matter can come from cars and the burning of coal, oil and biomass.
Casey, the author of the California study, said the findings from the two studies are related. “We know that preterm birth isn’t the end of the outcomes for a child that is born early,” she said.
Walter Einenkel of The Daily Kos, from whom I picked up the original pointer to this information, sees studies such as these as indicative of a bigger problem down the road:
The Trump administration’s insistence in attacking all of the clean air policies across our country is not simply craven because of its naked greed, it’s the beginnings of a public health crisis that the Republican Party is not interested in handling on any level. The importance of the study showing these health benefits in California is that Trump’s EPA has targeted the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy as the battleground for so much of its environmental rollbacks.
