The US Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to lower air quality standards. A measure that would benefit all Americans, and more particularly low-income African-American and white populations, who are already more exposed than others to air pollution.
Almost all the inhabitants of the planet would be exposed to levels of air pollution deemed dangerous to health by the WHO. According to a recent study by Monash University in Melbourne, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, only 0.001% of the population would breathe air considered healthy. Pollution levels are also at the heart of a proposal from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The latter proposes to revise downwards the air quality standards for fine particles known as PM2.5. Currently, the threshold is set at twelve micrograms per cubic meter. The agency would like to bring it down to nine or ten micrograms.
PM2.5 are small fine particles that are less than one-fiftieth the length of a human hair. They can seep into the lungs, into our circulatory system, which makes them very dangerous. They are generated, in particular, by road traffic and industrial emissions, and have become one of the main environmental risk factors for disease in the world.
In the United States, while implementing a stricter limit would benefit all Americans, this new regulation would benefit even more low-income African American and white populations, according to a new study from Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, published in the journal The New England School of Medicine, if the PM 2.5 limit dropped to eight micrograms per cubic meter, the death rate would drop by 4% for high-income white adults. For those with low incomes, this rate would drop by 6%. For African Americans, it would drop by 7%. To arrive at these results, the researchers relied on medical data from more than 73 million Americans aged 65 and over between 2000 and 2016, or 623 million person-years analyzed according to racial identity ( black or white), income level and average annual PM2.5 exposure by postal code.
“Our study shows that if stricter rules protect all aging Americans from air pollution, those who suffer the most will benefit the most, and that these benefits may be greater than previous studies suggest. “says Scott Delaney, co-lead author of the study and research associate in the Department of Environmental Health, in a statement. “However, structural racism seems to matter more than poverty when it comes to determining the health effects of air pollution,” adds Kevin Josey, co-lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in the department of biostatistics.
Previous studies have already highlighted the fact that people with modest incomes and people of color, black people in particular, are more exposed than the rest of the population to air pollutants harmful to health, such as PM2.5. . In the United States, we speak of environmental inequality or “redlining“. Redlining, or rather in French residential segregation, is a discriminatory housing policy, which condemns minorities to live in polluted areas. In 2021, research published in Science Advances showed in particular that black, Hispanic or Asian people were significantly more exposed to pollution than the rest of the population in several large cities in the United States.
“For decades, redlining has limited home ownership and wealth creation among racial minorities, contributing to a host of negative social outcomes, including high unemployment, poverty and vacancy, which persist today”, explained American researchers at the origin of a study published in Nature on March 2021.
